Context-aware service composition in pervasive computing environments

Abstract

A major challenge in pervasive computing environments is to provide users with complex, context-sensitive applications, dynamically composed from networked services. In this paper, we present an approach to the dynamic, context-aware composition of services to perform user tasks, i.e., software applications abstractly described on the user's handheld device. Both networked services and user tasks are modeled as semantic Web services in OWL-S extended with context information. The distinctive feature of our solution is the ability to compose Web services that expose complex behaviors (conversations) to realize a user task that itself has a complex behavior. Furthermore, the context-related requirements of the task are met by aggregating the context-sensitive behaviors of the individual services. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.