A collaborative and feature-based approach to Context-Sensitive Service Discovery

The emergence of mobile devices has enforced the rapid evolvement of the mobile Web. We envision a new and cheap class of mobile devices, which uses Web Services to provide their functionality. These devices will be especially useful in developing countries where access to computers is difficult due to high costs or missing infrastructure. To help users finding the services appropriate to their unique needs, a discovery model is needed which takes context information and user feedback into account. This paper introduces a novel Web Service discovery approach, built up on a feature-based service context model. Our architecture also allows automated and implicit collaboration of users, who share common contexts, interests and service needs. This is especially valuable for novice users, e. g. from developing countries. So far, Web Service discovery has had little attention in the mobile domain and existing systems for Web Service discovery generally do not consider context and community oriented user collaboration. Motivated by this, our current research with the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories focuses on context-sensitive intelligence (CSI) and its application to mobile service discovery.