An Approach to Dynamic Discovery of Context-Sensitive Web Services

With the Internet becoming increasingly present in people’s lives and the growing availability of Web Services (WS), new challenges have emerged for Software Engineering regarding application development based on composition of highly reusable services within the so-called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). One such challenge refers to how to automatically accomplish WS discovery at runtime in order to compose personalized application features that meet particular user’s requirements as his/her context of interaction changes. To tackle this issue, we propose in this paper an integrated approach that addresses dynamic WS discovery by combining the traditional WS technology stack with conceptions of Semantic Web on top of the UbiCon, a framework that supports contextsensitive behavior and supplies application with contextual information at runtime. The proposed approach counts on two main elements: (i) an algorithm that performs the dynamic discovery of context-sensitive WS; and (ii) a reusable software architecture that provides a skeleton which enables applying (i). The intention of this approach is to reduce development efforts and increase productivity as it encourages reusing prefabricated WS, as well as to improve software quality whereas applications are assembled as a set of services extensively tested and validated. Keywords-Web Services Discovery; Semantic UDDI; ContextSensitivity; SOAP; RESTful