A JESS-enabled context elicitation system for providing context-aware Web services

Providing context-aware Web services is an adaptive process of delivering contextually matched Web services to meet service requesters’ needs. We define the term “context” from two perspectives: one from service requesters; and the other from Web services. From the former perspective, context is defined as the surrounding environment affecting requesters’ services discovery and access, such as requesters’ preferences, locations, activities, and accessible network and devices. From the latter perspective, context is defined as the surrounding environment affecting Web services delivery and execution, such as networks and protocols for service binding, devices and platforms for service execution, and so on. This paper presents a Java Expert System Shell (JESS)-enabled context elicitation system featuring an ontology-based context model that formally describes and acquires contextual information pertaining to service requesters and Web services. Based on the context elicitation system, we present a context-aware services-oriented architecture for providing context-aware Web service request, publication, and discovery. Implementation details of the context elicitation system and the evaluation results of context-aware service provision are also reported.     

Web服务组合上下文模型

基于上下文感知计算,提出一种新颖的Web服务组合上下文模型.一方面,服务组合中的信息被定义为服务和用户上下文,前者又被区分为概要、会话和填充上下文;另一方面,采用多策略机制管理上下文.为此,定义了一种基于ECA规则的语言-服务扩展策略描述语言(PDL-S).采用以上语言描述上下文管理策略和组合服务.该模型不但充分利用了上下文感知计算,而且具有良好的协作性、扩展性和灵活性.     

基于语义Web技术的上下文感知的智能移动服务

语义Web技术应用于上下文感知的智能移动服务，通过构建上下文信息本体，使得移动服务的实体之间可以进行上下文信息共享和语义互操作，并进行上下文信息推理，实现智能服务。本文首先介绍了语义Web及本体技术，其次阐述了语义Web技术应用于上下文感知的移动服务，然后详细分析了智能移动服务中的上下文信息本体构建，包括通用的上下文信息本体、用户概况本体、情境本体以及服务本体等，接着介绍了相关的研究项目，最后进行展望和总结。     

基于语境和动作推理的语义Web服务发现

在语义Web服务发现中,服务本身及用户所处的语境是不可忽视的因素.针对现有服务发现方法的不足,给出一种基于语境和动作推理的语义Web服务发现方法.该方法通过建立基于动作的语境模型来刻画静态和动态的语境信息,利用动态描述逻辑中的动作推理实现语境推理,并在此基础上实现语境敏感的语义Web服务发现算法.案例研究及相关工作对比表明,与现有方法相比,文中方法在语境刻画和推理能力方面均有较优表现.同时实验结果也表明,在增加合理逻辑推理的时空开销的前提下,文中方法能为用户提供更符合需求的服务发现结果.     

Context-Aware Service Ranking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in practice for comprehensively monitoring and gathering physical information via a multitude of sensors. As the development of WSNs, the integration of them with the external Internet is a urgent need. By wrapping the sensor functionality as a WSN service, the Web service is considered as the most promising technology to incorporate WSNs into the Internet. The quest for selecting the service with the best performance promotes service ranking technology. However, due to the dynamic WSN environment, traditional quality of service (QoS) based ranking approaches for general Web services are no longer suitable for the WSN service. In this article, in order to fit the characteristics of the WSN environment, we propose a context-aware WSN service ranking approach by aggregating the user rating and WSN service context. First, the User QoS Assessment(UQA) and Context QoS Assessment(CQA) are proposed, respectively. Then, through the performance influence on the WSN service by the variations in their context, a Fuzzy mechanism is further developed to aggregate the UQA and the CQA. Finally, the experiments are presented to confirm the validity of the proposed approach.     

Toward Behavioral Web Services Using Policies

Making Web services context-aware is a challenge. This is like making Web service expose appropriate behaviors in response to changes detected in the environment. Context awareness requires a review and extension of the current execution model of Web services. This paper discusses the seamless combination of context and policy to manage behaviors that Web services expose during composition and in response to changes in the environment. For this purpose, a four-layer approach is devised. These layers are denoted by policy, user, Web service, and resource. In this approach, behavior management and binding are subject to executing policies of types permission, obligation, restriction, and dispensation. A prototype that illustrates how context and policy are woven into Web services composition scenarios is presented as well.      

Context optimization of AI planning for semantic Web services composition

Web services composition techniques are gaining momentum as the opportunity to establish reusable and versatile inter-operability applications. Many researchers propose their composition approach based on planning techniques. We propose our context aware planning method which comprises global planning and local optimization based on context information. The major technical contributions of this paper are: (1) We propose an ontology-based framework for the context-aware composition of Web services. Context model, which are structured based on OWL-S, captures the Service-related, Environment-related, and User-related context and can be used in an unambiguous, machine interpretable form. (2) We propose context-aware plan architecture and thus is more scalability and flexibility for the planning process, and thereby improving the efficiency and precision. (3) We propose a hybrid approach to build a plan corresponding to a context-aware service composition, based on global planning and local optimization, considering both the usability and adoption. We test our approach on a simple, yet realistic example, and the preliminary results demonstrate that our implementation provides a practical solution. This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No.90604017), the national 973 Project of China (No.2003CB317004) and the Nature Science Foundation of Beijing (No.4052025).     

面向普适环境的上下文感知中间件研究

针对普适环境下上下文感知计算需求,引入广义模型化理论,建立了一种面向通用环境资源的上下文信息数据模型;在此基础上,提出了上下文感知中间件体系框架,并详细阐述了其构件化的实施方案。该中间件平台的上下文获取层能够封装各类感知器捕获的资源信息,中间处理层负责信息的管理、推理和聚合,基于门面模式的上下文访问层提供同步和异步相结合的上下文信息统一访问入口。通过实验测试了平台的时间损耗,表明该中间件可提供通用的上下文感知服务且具有较好的系统性能。     

基于服务上下文的Web服务发现机制

服务发现成为Web服务组合研究的重点,为解决服务组合过程中服务发现方法存在动态适应能力不足,提出了一种基于服务上下文的Web服务发现机制.该机制将一种服务本体描述语言OWL-S和一种基于服务上下文的服务发现算法相结合,利用语义描述服务的信息,同时定义了服务上下文信息并进行服务上下文匹配来发现所需服务.实验结果表明,基于服务上下文的Web服务发现机制能够提高服务发现的准确性,具有较好地动态适应性.     

Context-Aware Web Service Composition based on AI Planning

A web service is an application that is published on the web and can be discovered and used automatically. In many cases, a web service cannot provide the capability that the user has requested. Therefore, according to the user request, it should be possible to combine various services and produce a new composite service for the user request. Context is the information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. In this paper, we present our context model for web service composition and implement the newly proposed framework for context-aware web service composition and show how the newly proposed framework reduces the number of failures and composition time.     

情景感知的物联网服务推荐方法研究

如何根据用户实时的情景高效地为其推荐最为合适的物联网服务,已经成为当前服务计算与物联网领域亟需解决的关键问题之一。针对这一问题,提出了一种基于情景感知的物联网服务推荐方法。首先基于改进的FolkRank算法生成当前用户可用的物联网服务列表;之后,依据用户当前关键的情景构建用户情景信息模型,根据用户的情景模型从服务列表中筛选出最能满足用户当前情景的物联网服务。实验结果表明,所提出的情景感知的物联网服务推荐方法是可行的与有效的。     

基于上下文感知进程网络的Web服务组合方法

针对Web服务组合的个性化问题,提出一种基于上下文感知进程网络的Web服务组合方法,支持上下文感知组合系统的高层建模与系统的底层实现。采用CCS进程代数和标签转换系统,描述上下文感知组合模型的形式化语义,给出上下文感知系统模型的实现框架。分析结果证明了该组合方法的可行性。     

基于领域本体的可信服务组合

针对现有Web服务组合方法缺乏对服务自身属性信任问题的深入考虑,服务组合过程可信需求无法得到保障,提出了一种基于领域本体的可信Web服务组合方法。将服务的非功能属性分为服务质量、服务信任和服务上下文三个主要方面,并采用本体构建工具Protégé构建原子服务本体,利用推理机FaCT++对原始服务集进行本体推理过滤;引入了融合本体推理过滤的Web服务架构;提出了基于层次任务网络(hierarchical tasknetwork,HTN)规划法的可信服务组合算法。仿真实验表明:与传统的组合方法相比,该方法可有效提高服务组合的效率和成功率。     

Toward an OSGi-based infrastructure for context-aware applications

Applications and services must adapt to changing contexts in dynamic environments. However, building context-aware applications is still complex and time-consuming due to inadequate infrastructure support. We propose a context-aware infrastructure for building and rapidly prototyping such applications in a smart-home environment. This OSGi-based infrastructure manages context-aware services reliably and securely and efficiently supports context acquisition, discovery, and reasoning. A formal, ontology-based context model enables semantic context representation, reasoning, and knowledge sharing. We propose an ontology-based context model that leverages Semantic Web technology and OWL (Web Ontology Language). OWL is an ontology markup language that enables context sharing and context reasoning. Based on our context model, we also propose a service-oriented context-aware middleware (SOCAM) architecture, including a set of independent services that perform context discovery, acquisition, and interpretation.     

基于本体的NGN上下文感知业务设计与实现

为使NGN业务具有良好的适应性满足用户在灵活多变环境下的需要,提出基于本体的上下文感知业务生成框架,该框架对NGN中上下文业务系统的开发起到关键作用。分析NGN业务实现关键问题以及利用本体进行感知计算的方法,最后给出业务实现实例说明技术应用方法和该框架的可行性。     

支持情境感知计算的上下文服务框架研究

针对纷繁复杂的高层应用亟需的多样化、个性化的环境感知服务需求,提出一种支持情境感知计算的上下文服务框架,自底向上包含上下文信息采集层、信息管理层、事件管理层和门面访问层.信息采集层负责封装感知器捕获的环境资源信息;信息管理层提供信息的组织、维护及持久化;事件管理层建立了复合上下文事件的形式化表达,并引入时间窗口凸显事件的强时效特点;门面访问层提供同步和异步互补的灵活访问机制.实验结果表明了该框架的合理性与可行性.     

Personal service areas for mobile Web applications

Location-based mobile services let wireless mobile users access Web-based information about resources in their immediate vicinities. The authors describe an algorithm that draws on context mobility elements, such as the user's travel direction and speed, to form personal service areas. Their experimental context-aware tourist information system (CATIS) leverages XML technologies and Web services to provide tourist information to mobile users based on these personal service areas and the users' preferences. Because Web service performance depends on the underlying databases, the authors also developed a layered caching scheme for storing environmental data to improve response time.     

Adaptive and context-aware service composition for IoT-based smart cities

Smart Cities are advancing towards an instrumented, integrated, and intelligent living space, where Internet of Things (IoT), mobile technologies and next generation networks are expected to play a key role. In smart cities, numerous IoT-based services are likely to be available and a key challenge is to allow mobile users perform their daily tasks dynamically, by integrating the services available in their vicinity. Semantic Service Oriented Architectures (SSOA) abstract the environment’s services and their functionalities as Semantic Web Services (SWS). However, existing service composition approaches based on SSOA do not support dynamic reasoning on user tasks and service behaviours to deal with the heterogeneity of IoT domains. In this paper, we present an adaptive service composition framework that supports such dynamic reasoning. The framework is based on wEASEL, an abstract service model representing services and user tasks in terms of their signature, specification (i.e., context-aware pre-conditions, post-conditions and effects) and conversation (i.e., behaviour with related data-flow and context-flow constraints). To evaluate our composition framework, we develop a novel OWLS-TC4-based testbed by combining simple and composite services. The evaluation shows that our wEASEL-based system performs more accurate composition and allows end-users to discover and investigate more composition opportunities than other approaches.     

基于本体的上下文感知中间件框架

上下文感知是普适计算的核心技术之一,而描述和理解上下文信息是上下文感知的前提。由于上下文信息种类繁多、感知方式迥异,目前开发面向特定应用的上下文感知系统缺乏统一的机制和通用的架构,增加了系统开发的成本。引入语义Web技术,利用本体对上下文信息进行建模,采用本体描述语言描述上下文模型,提供了一个公共的上下文本体以实现多个独立开发的上下文感知系统对知识的共享和推理,构建了通用的上下文感知中间件框架,从而实现对域内上下文知识的共同理解。     

A synergy between context-aware policies and AOP to achieve highly adaptable Web services

Modern service-based systems are frequently required to be highly adaptable in order to cope with rapid changes and evolution of business goals, requirements, as well as physical context in a dynamic business environment. Unfortunately, adaptive systems are still difficult to build due to their high complexity. In this paper, we propose a new approach for developing highly adaptable Web services based on a synergy between context-aware Web service policies and Aspect-Oriented Programming. This synergy is achieved through the elaboration of an innovative extension of the Web Service Policy Language (WSPL), which allows for context specification at both policy and rule levels. In addition, we provide a tool for the development of aspect-oriented policies, including an option to translate WSPL policies into aspect-oriented policies. These policies can be automatically woven into composite Web services (e.g., a BPEL process). The elaborated synergy between context, policies, and aspects allows service providers to increase the level of adaptability of Web services at different layers of applications.