Modeling dynamic service behavior using context functions

Context-awareness is an omnipresent topic in today's service-oriented Web environment, but is still highly researched to enable a uniform and pervasive applicability. Many approaches are still application dependent or require the user to define complex profiles, semantic service descriptions, or rules. In this paper, we introduce an approach that should ease the prototyping of context-aware services and allow for a fast adaptation to new application areas. For this purpose, we define the notion of context functions and describe a proper framework and semantic data model. Our best-effort approach considers incomplete context information, may flexibly combine different types of context data, and allows for the incorporation of chance to model dynamic service behavior. Semantic Web technology is utilized to easily define and decouple context-aware descriptions from the actual service logic.