ContextServ: Towards Model-Driven Development of Context-AwareWeb Services

In the era of Web of Things and Services, Context-aware Web Services (CASs) are emerging as an important technology for building innovative context-aware applications. CASs enable the information integration from both the physical and virtual world, which affects human living. However, it is challenging to build CASs, due to the lack of context provisioning management approach and limited generic approach for formalizing the development process. We therefore propose ContextServ, a platform that uses a model-driven approach to support the full life cycle of CASs development, hence offering significant design and management flexibility. ContextServ implements a proposed UML-based modelling language ContextUML to support multiple modelling languages. It also supports dynamic adaptation of WS-BPEL based context-aware composite services by weaving context-aware rules into the process. Extensive experimental evaluations on ContextServ and its components showcase that ContextServ can support effective development and efficient execution of context-aware Web services.