Applying Context-awareness to Service-oriented Architecture

Abstract. Mobile devices used today have limited capabilities of gath-ering information about the situation in which they are used – the context – collecting data by sensors built into the devices. The currently pop-ular service-oriented architecture paradigm composes applications from distributed services which provide a specific function through a platform-independent interface. In this paper, we describe possible relationships between context-aware applications and service-oriented architectures. The paper takes a close look on architectures of middleware that pro-vide context management capabilities to service-oriented environments. We further propose a layered reference architecture following common-alities between the systems we inspected. We describe several systems as examples for applications benefiting from context-awareness, such as context-sensitive service discovery.