Context-awareness in the software domain-A semantic web enabled modeling approach

Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in the use of contextual information in ubiquitous and ambient computing. Such information improves situated cognition and awareness as well as stakeholders' usage experience. While domains such as Web 3.0 - the next generation of the web - have made context-awareness a main requirement of their solution space, the software engineering domain still lacks the same rate of adoption. In our research, we introduce an ontology based context-aware meta-model that takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies to capture and formalize context information. Providing such formal context representation allows us to make context information an integrated and reusable part of the software engineering domain. We present several case studies related to the software evolution domain to illustrate the benefit of sharing and reusing context for various software engineering tasks, such as mentor recommendation, code search, and result ranking.