The Context Oriented Architecture: An Augmentation of Context Awareness and Reactivity into Web Services

Summary

Standardization promotes web services as a very promising candidate for successfully integrating disparately heterogeneous systems. As such, web services prove themselves to be very suitable candidates for supporting the predominantly heterogeneous pervasive environments. The ability of web services however to sense their surrounding context and effectively react to it is still a matter of research. In this work, we introduce a new architecture, an architecture solely built on open standards, that supports the development of context aware and context reactive applications that use web services as building components. We describe in detail the various components of this architecture, along with their supporting interactions. Furthermore, we describe the expansion of the OWL-S ontology language, namely expanding both the profile and the process model ontologies, to allow for encoding context behavior of both web services and clients. We eventually illustrate validation scenarios for this architecture, and demonstrate an application example built using this architecture that adapts to ambient security requirements.