Study and Evaluation of Context-Aware Service Composition and Change-Over Using BPEL Engine and Semantic Web Techniques

Context-aware and customization services are expected in the forthcoming ubiquitous computing era. Therefore, we have studied a flexible service-composition technology according to the user context. In this paper, we present a new framework of context-aware service composition and change-over using the BPEL engine and semantic web technology. Using a commercially available BPEL engine, we achieved commercial-level quality at a low cost. In our method, U-ske (ubiquitous service kernel emulator) searches for and selects appropriate service components using semantic information and user context, generates a BPEL description, and deploys that description in the BPEL engine. The BPEL engine invokes each web service based on the deployed BPEL description. We also considered a method for service change-over, which is a problem in using the BPEL engine. We have implemented the proposed method and evaluated its feasibility, multi-vendor compatibility, and processing performance. The evaluation results demonstrate our method effectiveness.