Identifying context sources towards context-aware adapted web services

Abstract

Context-awareness refers to the ability of services and applications to proactively adapt their behavior to the characteristics of the execution environment, such as weather conditions, location, etc., namely context. Web services as the most popular implementation of service-oriented applications are usually exploited in this field. During the development process of such services an interesting challenge lies in identifying reusable context properties or services that constitute potential context sources for the adaptation to context. In this paper a solution for this context source matchmaking is proposed. The identification is performed by matching the WSDL specifications participating either as business services or as context sources. The procedure is demonstrated through an evaluation exploiting descriptions from online service registries.