A rule-based framework for managing context-aware services based on heterogeneous and distributed Web services

With the spread of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) systems and cloud services, various kinds of data are available through Web services. A context-aware service recognizes a real-world context from such data and behaves autonomously based on the context. However, it has been challenging to manage contexts and services defined on the heterogeneous and distributed Web services. In this paper, we propose a framework, called RuCAS, which systematically creates and manages context-aware service using various Web services (e.g. information services, sensor services, networked appliances, etc.). The framework describes every context-aware service by an ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rule. For this, an event is a context triggering the service, a condition is a set of contexts to be satisfied for execution, and the action is a set of Web services to be executed by the service. Thus, every context-aware service is simply managed in a uniform manner. Since the RuCAS is published as a Web service, it is easy for various applications to reuse and integrate created contexts and services. As a case study, RuCAS is applied to creating context-aware services in a real home network system.