Applying Context-Awareness to Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a new paradigm, where it is imperative to automatically adapt to the changing context in the environment. This paper applies context awareness to service-oriented architecture to build reusable, adaptable, spontaneous and flexible context-awareness systems. We develop an ontology based context model, and domain-analyst oriented context reasoning rules, which are automatically translated to SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) to derive active situations. A mapping mechanism is developed to intelligently and dynamically select services based on current situations. Experiments are performed to evaluate the stability of data acquisition, impact of data load, communication distances and the number of rules.