Towards a Context-Aware Service Directory

Advances in the areas of mobile computing and web services lead to new scenarios of use and innovative applications. Our approach involves mobile devices that act not only as requestors of data, but as data providers as well, providing access to their data through web services. Context plays an important role in such a scenario, when used to improve existing service discovery mechanisms, by finding the most appropriate service conforming to the search criteria. In this paper we propose a context-aware service directory and we investigate the process of service discovery with respect to contextual information. We adopt the MOEM model for representing contextual information within the service directory and we try to improve the performance of searching. Furthermore, we deal with issues related to the temporal dimension of context, namely prediction of service availability. We also present some preliminary experimental results concerning the search costs.