Web service matchmaking for the development of context-aware applications

Context-awareness is related to the application capability to respond proactively to environment conditions. The reuse of existing components is an important challenge in the development of context-aware applications. Web services (WSs), usually exploited in this field acting either as business services by providing specific functionality or as context sources by exposing the retrieval of context information, need to be discovered and matched. In this study, the matchmaking of WSs for the identification of potential context sources is proposed. Descriptions are matched based on context adaptation cases, whereas the process is based on adequate WS descriptions that derive from the proposed semantic WS profile. The procedure is illustrated through a proof of concept based on service descriptions retrieved from online service registries.