  In the era of Web of Things and Services, Context-aware Web Services (CASs)
are emerging as an important technology for building innovative context-aware
applications. CASs enable the information integration from both the physical
and virtual world, which affects human living. However, it is challenging to
build CASs, due to the lack of context provisioning management approach and
limited generic approach for formalizing the development process. We therefore
propose ContextServ, a platform that uses a model-driven approach to support
the full life cycle of CASs development, hence offering significant design and
management flexibility. ContextServ implements a proposed UML-based modelling
language ContextUML to support multiple modelling languages. It also supports
dynamic adaptation of WS-BPEL based context-aware composite services by weaving
context-aware rules into the process. Extensive experimental evaluations on
ContextServ and its components showcase that ContextServ can support effective
development and efficient execution of context-aware Web services.

Software Engineering