Abstract—The development of context-aware applications in a pervasive environment is a very hard work because each situation can be influenced by several factors and features such as users mobility, information heterogeneity and systems distribution. So, new application will be able to adapt its services with the change of context of use and satisfy all users’ preferences. In this work we present an UML class diagram extension for representing and modeling context because UML standard notation does not support all aspects of the context of use in an adequate manner. This extension is defined by some extensibility mechanisms and it is presented as a set of new tools for the unified modeling language. The proposed extension is based on UML notation and it permits obtaining a specific graphic representation of a contextual situation. Also, it facilitates the extraction and the modeling of all elements that can influence the current situation of the user. Our proposal consists on creating some stereotypes that are described by several tagged values and some constraints and that can be applied to the contextual model classes. Then we use a class diagram to describe the different types of context and their relationships. A case study is done in the medical domain in which we propose a new contextual model including all new stereotypes by using StarUML software modeling platform.

Index Terms—software engineering, context-aware, modeling, UML, class diagram, extensibility mechanisms  

Cite: Mohamed Salah Benselim and Hassina Seridi-Bouchelaghem, "Extending UML Class Diagram Notation for the Development of Context-aware Applications," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 35-44, February 2013. doi:10.4304/jetwi.5.1.35-44