Integrating Context Awareness with SOA: Case Studies for Serviceoriented and Context-based Architectures

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has proven to be a mature mechanism in various fields of Computer Science, including Pervasive Computing. Several research projects facilitate SOA concepts and/or technologies in order to achieve more interoperability, agility, and reliability in distributed, heterogeneous environments. Nevertheless, approaches to make use of contextual information directly within a SOA are still rare. This article describes a concept for integrating SOA with context, based on a previously presented middleware that implements this concept. The validity of the approach is demonstrated by means of a mobile multimedia application.