Context handling in a SOA infrastructure for mobile applications

Context-aware mobile applications can dynamically adapt their behaviour to changes in the user context and provide their users with relevant services anywhere and at anytime. In order to develop such applications, a flexible infrastructure is necessary that supports several tasks, such as context information gathering and services provisioning according to this information. This paper presents a SOA-based infrastructure that divides these tasks among several components. These components interoperate by making use of each other’s services. In order to allow components interoperability, we propose the use of context models, which represent the relevant concepts of our application domain independently of specific design and technological choices. Moreover, we present a generic component, the context expression evaluator, which has been defined to facilitate the handling of context conditions, and we illustrate how this component has been integrated with other components of our infrastructure by using context models.