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K. Rasch, F. Li, S. Sehic, R. Ayani, S. Dustdar:
"Context-driven personalized service discovery in pervasive environments";
World Wide Web - Internet and Web Information Systems, Online First (2011), 27 January 2011; 25 pages.

Pervasive environments are characterized by a large number of embedded
devices offering their services to the user.Which of the available services are of most
interest to the user considerably depends on the user´s current context. User context
is often rich and very dynamic; making an explicit, user-driven discovery of services
impractical. Users in such environments would instead like to be continuously
informed about services relevant to them. Implicit discovery requests triggered by
changes in the context are therefore prevalent. This paper proposes a proactive
service discovery approach for pervasive environments addressing these implicit
requests. Services and user preferences are described by a formal context model
called Hyperspace Analogue to Context, which effectively captures the dynamics of context and the relationship between services and context. Based on the model, we
propose a set of algorithms that can continuously present the most relevant services
to the user in response to changes of context, services or user preferences. Numeric
coding methods are applied to improve the algorithms´ performance. The algorithms
are grounded in a context-driven service discovery system that automatically reacts
to changes in the environment. New context sources and services can be dynamically
integrated into the system. A client for smart phones continuously informs users
about the discovery results. Experiments show, that the system can efficiently
provide the user with continuous, up-to-date information about the most useful
services in real time.

pervasive environments · context awareness · context model · service discovery

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11280-011-0112-x

Project Head Schahram Dustdar:
SM4ALL