The Context Oriented Architecture: Integrating Context into Semantic Web Services

While emerging standards promote the interoperability of web services, web services adaptability to user and application context is a requirement yet to be investigated. Web services today encapsulate application and business logic and are candidates for supporting pervasive environments, where adaptability will have added value in all of these domains. In this paper we introduce the context oriented architecture; an architecture for building context aware applications using web services as building components. The context oriented architecture uses semantic description to automate monitoring and responding to service context. We extend the specifications and implementation of the semantic web service ontology language (OWL-S) to represent the context profile of a web service.