Situvis: visualising multivariate context information to evaluate situation specifications

One of the many challenges faced when evaluating context aware ubiquitous systems is to gain some understanding of the constant influx of context data into the system. Elsewhere, context has been distilled into more natural abstractions called situations with the aim of making these systems more understandable and intuitive to develop applications for, though codifying and manipulating these situations still presents problems. We introduce Situvis, a tool we have developed based on the Parallel Coordinates Visualisation technique, which assists users by visually representing the conditions that need to be present for a situation to be triggered in terms of the real-world context that is being recorded in their system, and allows the user to visually inspect these properties, evaluate their correctness, and change them as required. We describe the use of our tool with a small user study.