Applying Web Services Technologies to the Management of Context Provisioning
Michael Brenner, Michael Schiffers · 2003
For a service to be context-aware it must be able to discover and take advantage of contextual information like device capabilities, user surroundings, or the user’s current preferences. Ensuring the availability of this information according to predefined quality parameters requires an adequate management of the whole process of sensing, interpreting, iteratively refining and disseminating large amounts of context information in multi-provider environments. These phases are subsumed under the term context provisioning. While research in context-awareness so far has been focusing on functionalities, this paper explicitly emphasizes management aspects of context provisioning. In our projects we are investigating the applicability of Web Services architectures for the provisioning of context information. Advantages are, besides the universal reach, the simple way to describe, encapsulate, advertise and access the services which eventually deliver the respective context information. But using Web Services for context provisioning poses two important questions: Is the Web Services model adequate enough for building a generic context provisioning architecture? And: Is the Web Services model at the same time also adequate enough for the management of context provisioning? This paper addresses both, but emphasizes the management challenges, especially regarding service configuration, inherent to context provisioning and proposes approaches to their solution. 1