Interaction templates for pervasive service chains

This paper presents a novel framework enabling service integration in pervasive computing environments. It augments our previous work on context-aware selection and execution of services by allowing one to chain up multiple services as provided by personal area networks (PANs) and the user's current environment. Our approach is based on interaction templates which create context-aware packets (CAPs) based on the current user's context. CAPs provide means to describe service interactions governed by context constraints, which mediate the user's service requirements to the environment. Interaction template documents act as intermediary instances for expressing service interactions, and may be easily edited. Thereby, interaction templates de-couple context-aware service interactions from the issuing applications; this separation of concerns eases the management of these applications significantly.