Context-Aware Design of Semantic Web Services to Improve the Precision of Compositions

Service-based systems are usually conceived and executed in highly dynamic environments. To support their automatic adaptation to this variability, execution context should be considered as a first-class concept during their design. This paper proposes a design approach that exploits semantics for modeling contexts and related systems’ behaviors. The context model extends the OWL-S ontology to enrich the expressiveness of each section of an OWL-annotated service, by means of conditions and adaptation rules. These additional descriptions can be exploited by a discovery/composition tool to automatically find the services better-tuned to the requestor’s behaviors and the particular situations of the environment.