Context-aware Composition of Semantic Web Services

Service-based systems are usually conceived and executed in highly dynamic environments, characterized by complex and continuously evolving users’ requirements and surrounding conditions. To address this dynamicity, these systems should be designed keeping in mind the different execution contexts where they could be used. This typically impacts service discovery and composition with the aim of dynamically forging the system behavior better fitting a given context. This paper proposes a design approach based on a semantic model for context representation. It is an extension of the OWL-S ontology aimed at enriching the expressiveness of each section of a typical OWL-S semantic service description, by means of context conditions and adaptation rules. By having access to continuously updated context information, these descriptions can be exploited by a discovery/composition tool to automatically find the atomic or composite services that can be better-tuned to the requestor’s behaviors and to the particular situations of the surrounding environment.