Design and Implementation of Rule-Based Framework for Context-Aware Services with Web Services

Modern cloud services and machine-to-machine (M2M) systems provide various kinds of data via various Web services. Implementing context-aware services integrating such global data are promising in various applications. However, it has been challenging to manage heterogeneous contexts and services defined in various Web services. To cope with this, we design a framework, called RuCAS, which systematically manages every context-aware service in form of ECA (Event Condition-Action) rule. We also develop RuCAS platform, which publishes API of RuCAS as Web service. Using the RuCAS platform, users can define their own contexts with various Web services (e.g., information service, sensor services, networked appliances, etc.). Based on the defined contexts, they can create ECA rules to define custom context aware services. To support users, We also implement a GUI front-end of RuCAS platform, called RuCAS.me. RuCAS.me supports users even if the users are non-expert. A case study in a real home network system demonstrates practical feasibility of RuCAS platform and RuCAS.me. The contribution of this paper is to provide design and implementation details of RuCAS, by which one can fully understand systematic management of context-aware services with Web services.