Designing and Building Context-Aware Services: The ContextServ Project

Quan Z. Sheng, Jian Yu, Wei Emma Zhang, Shuang Wang, Xiaoping Li, Boualem Benatallah

Abstract: In the era of Web of Things and services, context-aware services (CASs) are emerging as an important technology for building innovative smart applications. CASs enable the information integration from both the physical and virtual world, which affects the way human live. However, it is still challenging to build CASs, due to lack of context provisioning management approach and lack of generic approach for formalizing the development process. In this paper, we briefly introduce a large research project, ContextServ, which provides a platform for model-driven development of CASs based on a UML-based modelling language. We discuss the literature and also highlight several future research opportunities for context-aware service research and development.