ANNEX A. Resources of the systematic mapping on context modelling
Research questions
In this step we specify the research questions which will allow conducting the review methodology.
To formulate them, we have used the PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome)
criteria [Kitchenham and Charters 2007]. This framework consists on defining research questions by
means of these criteria allowing dissecting useful keywords to structure the main string search in
order to obtain more evidence from the study field. The general idea of PICO is suitable to organize
any search strategy; however, the comparison criterion is out of the scope of this review since we are
not interested on comparing context models, but rather, our interest is focused on the resources
provided by each of the context models having a significant impact on the value delivered through
services. Therefore, the main research question is finally formulated as shown in Table I. As it can
be seen, the main research question is too generic, so that we refined it into specific sub-questions
considering interests and motivations of the review.
Table I. Research questions
Main research question
In the field of services (P), do context models (I) proposed so far provide an adequate and structured set
of modeling resources enabling reasoning, reusability and defining context affecting positively or
negatively entities involved in the process of service provisioning and consumption (O)?
Specific sub-questions
Research sub-question
Interest and motivation
RQ1.1. What is the chronological
Identify the proposals in the field, find their interrelationships
overview of the research done so far
and distribute them along time to find any significant trend
in context models for services?
RQ1.2. What are the characteristics
Make explicit the main characteristics of these context models
of the proposed context models?
in terms of size, structure and completeness
RQ1.3. Which context information
Identify aspects related to the scope of these context models,
and entities are the most addressed
such as: what are the contexts and entities attracting more
in these context models?
attention from researchers since it may help to understand
their priorities and eventually some research gaps
RQ1.4. What are the most
We aim at identifying the most recurrent definitions of context
consolidated context information and
information and entities, which in some sense could be
entities?
considered as the starting point of any new future proposal
The Protocol
The definition of the protocol comprises the selection of bibliographic sources where the electronic
documents are systematically sought following a well-defined search string by means of the
identified keywords, and finally, the selection criteria are established to retrieve the most significant
works in the field.
1.2.1. Bibliographic sources. The search process conducted in this systematic mapping comprises
automatic and manual searches. The automatic search is carried out by using bibliographic
databases, and the manual search through collecting the works from specific journals and
conferences of the interest field. Advantages and drawbacks of both approaches are analyzed
through a case study in [Kitchenham et al. 2009]. Based on this analysis, we decided to integrate
both strategies by accomplishing an automatic search in the selected databases and complementing
the results with manual searches to the most relevant conferences and journals if some issue was
missing. Finally, to select the bibliographic sources relevant to this review we follow the study and
selection criteria provided in [Dieste et al. 2009] to select bibliographic databases. Therefore, the
selected databases were Scopus, IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library.
In order to ensure the coverage of the review, we identified a list of journals and conferences
relevant to this study that should be considered as potential sources of research works. We targeted
venues mainly in the field of software services and context modeling such as pervasive and
ubiquitous computing; adaptive systems, human-computer interaction, semantic web and
information technologies (see Table II). These venues were selected from the top ranked list based on
the JCR impact factor for journals and the CORE-A status1 for conferences. It is important to keep in
mind that these sources are just for the purpose of checking completeness of the study, which will
include other conferences and journals within computer science categories, due the broad spectrum
of the selected databases (DB).
Table II. Journals and conferences classified by category
Categories
Surveys
Pervasive
and
ubiquitous
computing
& Adaptive
systems
Services
Human
computer
interaction
Journals
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR); IEEE
Communications Surveys and Tutorials.
IEEE Pervasive Computing; Pervasive
and Mobile Computing (PerCom);
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
(PUC); Adaptive Behaviour; Journal of
Ambient
Intelligence
and
Smart
Environments
(JAISE);
ACM
Transactions on Autonomous and
Adaptive Systems (TAAS).
IEEE
Transactions
on
Services
Computing (TSC); International Journal
of Web and Grid Services (IJWGS).
International Journal of HumanComputer Studies; ACM Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction.
Applied Ontology.
Modelling
Web and
semantic
web
Information
technologies
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB);
Journal of Web Semantics (JWS); World
Wide
Web-Internet
and
Web
Information Systems (WWW).
Information
Sciences;
Journal
of
Information
Technology
(JIT);
Information Systems (IS); Computer;
IEEE Software; Advanced Engineering
Informatics; European Journal of
Information Systems (EJIS); Data &
Knowledge Engineering (DKE); Journal
of Information Science (JIS); Journal of
Systems and Software (JSS); IEEE
Transactions on Software Engineering
(TSE);
Journal
of
the
ACM;
Communications of the ACM.
Conferences
IEEE International Conference on Pervasive
Computing and Communications (PERCOM);
International Conference on Pervasive
Computing
(PERVASIVE);
Ubiquitous
Computing
(UbiComp);
International
Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous
Systems:
Networks
and
Services
(Mobiquitous).
IEEE International Conference on Services
Computing (SCC); IEEE International
Conference on Web Services (ICWS);
International
Conference
on
Service
Oriented Computing (ICSOC).
British Computer Society Conference on
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); IFIP
TC13 Conference on Human-Computer
Interaction (Interact).
International Conference on Conceptual
Modelling (ER); International Conference on
Formal Ontology in Information Systems
(FOIS).
International World Wide Web Conference
(WWW); International Conference on Web
Information Systems Engineering (WISE);
International Semantic Web Conference
(ISWC); Extended Semantic Web Conference
(ESWC).
International Conference on Information
Systems
(ICIS);
ACM
International
Conference on Information and Knowledge
Management (CIKM); Americas Conference
on Information Systems (AMCIS); European
Conference on Information Systems (ECIS);
International Conference on Advanced
Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE);
International Conference on Computational
Science (ICCS); Enterprise Distributed
Object Computing Conference (EDOC).
Conferences and journals shown above were reviewed to verify that all their editions from 2001 to
2014 were indexed and published in the selected DB. This evaluation allowed us to identify when to
apply automatic or manual searches, i.e. whether the journal or conference was published with all its
editions in some of the selected databases means that it is sufficient to apply an automatic search,
otherwise, it is necessary to apply manual searches for each edition missed, leading to searches in a
specific Digital Bibliographic Library (DBL) of a conference or journal.
The results obtained are depicted in Table III, we omitted conferences and journals that were
indexed and published in all of their editions such as Information Science, IEEE Pervasive
Computing, Adaptive behavior, and so on. Hence, it was only specified those conferences and
There is no standard procedure to select the list of conferences. Although the CORE-A index, as any other, can raise
controversy, we consider that it is a good indicator for our purposes. http://core.edu.au/index.php/conference-rankings.
1
journals involving manual searches such as TSC, IJWGS, WWW, etc., having editions not included
in the databases. This issue was found in a higher proportion in conferences than journals: 17
conferences and 7 journals that were addressed with manual searches for each edition missing in the
next stage of the systematic mapping.
Table III. Manual and automatic searches
Journal
IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor.
IEEE Trans. Serv. C.
Int. J. Web Grid Serv.
World Wide Web
ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.
Pers. Ubiquitous C.
Applied Ontology
Conference
ICIS
PERVASIVE
UbiComp
AMCIS
HCI
ECIS
ICWS
Interact
CAiSE
ICCS
ER
FOIS
MobiQuitous
ICSOC
WISE
ISWC
ESWC
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
NP
NP
NP
M
M
M
NP
M
NP
NP
M
M
M
NP
M
NP
NP
A
A
M
NP
M
NP
NP
A
A
M
NP
A
NP
M
A
A
A
M
A
NP
M
A
A
A
M
A
NP
A
A
A
A
M
A
M
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
M
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
M
NP
M
NP
NP
M
NP
NP
M
M
M
A
NP
NP
M
M
NP
M
M
M
NP
NP
M
NP
NP
M
M
M
NP
NP
NP
M
M
NP
M
NP
M
M
NP
M
M
M
M
M
M
NP
NP
M
M
M
NP
M
M
M
M
M
M
A
NP
M
M
M
NP
A
A
M
M
M
A
A
M
A
NP
A
A
M
M
M
M
NP
A
M
M
M
M
A
A
A
A
NP
A
A
NP
M
M
M
M
A
M
M
M
M
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
M
M
M
M
NP
A
M
M
M
M
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
NP
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
M
M
M
M
NP
A
M
M
M
M
A
A
A
A
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A
A
NP
M
M
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M
M
M
M
M
M
A
A
A
A
M
A
A
M
M
M
A
NP
M
M
M
A
M
A
A
A
A
M
M
A
NP
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
M
NY
A
M
M
M
A
M
M
M
M
NP
M
M
M
M
M
NY
NY
M
M
M
M
NY
NY
M
M
M
M
NY
M
M
M
M
Legend: A - Automatic, M - Manual, NP - Unpublished, NY - Not Yet Available
1.2.2. Keywords used. To structure the main search string of the review we acquired the keywords from
the PICO criteria specified in Section 1.1. Specifically Population and Intervention criteria are used
to extract them. Although in [Kitchenham and Charters 2007] it is recommended to consider
keywords also from Comparison and Outcome criteria since it is the common procedure in the field of
medicine, we have not used them. As stated in [Kitchenham et al. 2007] and identified in other SLRs
[Riaz et al. 2009] and systematic mappings [Petersen et al. 2008], this is not always applicable. In
our case, Comparison was discarded in the establishment of the research questions and Outcome was
not considered because it is not based on a particular measurement in the research questions. Hence,
from each term of the Population and Intervention criteria, we identified the keywords used to build
the search string as is depicted in Table IV.
Table IV. Keywords and search string
Criteria
Population
Intervention
Keyword
Service
Context
model
Variants
“service”, “services”
“context model”, “context models”, “contexts model”, “contexts models”;
“context ontology”, “context ontologies”, “contexts ontology”, “contexts
ontologies”; “context taxonomy”, “context taxonomies”, “contexts taxonomy”,
“contexts taxonomies”; “context hierarchy”, “context hierarchies”, “contexts
hierarchy”, “contexts hierarchies”
Search string
(“service” OR “services”) AND (“context model” OR “context models” OR “contexts model” OR “contexts
models” OR “context ontology” OR “context ontologies” OR “contexts ontology” OR “contexts ontologies”
OR “context taxonomy” OR “context taxonomies” OR “contexts taxonomy” OR “contexts taxonomies” OR
“context hierarchy” OR “context hierarchies” OR “contexts hierarchy” OR “contexts hierarchies”)
Note that to build the search string, variants inside Population and Intervention criteria are
interconnected through OR connectors (e.g. “service” OR “services”) and finally, these criteria are
joined through an AND connector.
1.2.3. Selection criteria. Once the results were obtained we considered the following selection criteria to
decide which works could be relevant to the review:
— Filter by Title. Criterion used to quickly identify and remove noise from results.
— Filter by Abstract. Criterion used to delete works whose scope is clearly unrelated to context
models.
— Filter by Full paper. Criterion that represents a fast reading of the papers to discard those that
did not fulfill properly the following inclusion criteria: (1) presenting a context model as one of the
contributions of the paper; (2) defining explicitly the context model.
— Addition of further work (snowballing). Criterion that gathers further works during the
systematic mapping process. In this regard, we have included those works fulfilling the previous
inclusion criteria.
The results obtained from the searches are described as follows: 503 papers automatically from
Scopus, 266 from IEEE Xplore and 42 from ACM DL yielding a total of 811 papers from which 231
were removed as they were duplicated, resulting 580 papers found automatically. Then, 111 papers
were added from manual searches, gathering 691 papers from which 496 were deleted by title and
abstract, resulting in 195 papers to filter by fast reading. Discarding 6 papers that were initially not
available, we tried to contact the authors but the answers and facilitated resources were limited.
Finally, the resulting papers after filtering by full paper were 94 and after adding 19 papers by
snowballing 113 papers to include in the review were obtained. However, after reviewing these
papers we found a set of equivalent proposals, i.e., proposals from the same authors with a similar
contribution; in this case we select the most current proposal to be evaluated. Figure 1 summarizes
the results obtained.
Fig. 1. Primary studies selection process.
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