Service Interoperability on Context Level in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Abstract

Within distributed systems, interoperability is a key feature enabling the interaction between distributed components. This paper elaborates several approaches of achieving interoperability on different levels with a focus on service interoperability. The analysis of existing approaches motivates the introduction of the context level as a new level of service interoperability. It is shown how context relates to interoperability and why it is useful to deal with contextual service interoperability on a separate level. In particular, ubiquitous computing systems benefit from a procedure called dynamic context association, which supports service provider and service user in gaining access to diverse and rapidly changing context information. A new XML based Context Ontology Language (CoOL) which specifies a common understanding of the relations between services and context models is outlined.