RuCAS: Rule-Based Framework for Managing Context-Aware Services with Distributed Web Services

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) systems and cloud services provide various kinds of data via distributed Web services. A context-aware service recognizes real-world contexts from such data and behaves autonomously. However, it has been challenging to manage contexts and services defined on the heterogeneous and distributed Web services. In this paper, the authors propose a framework, called RuCAS, which systematically creates and manages context-aware service using various Web services. RuCAS describes every context-aware service by an ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rule. For this, an event is a context triggering the service, a condition is a set of contexts to be satisfied for execution, and the action is a set of Web services to be executed by the service. Thus, every context-aware service is managed in a uniform manner. Since RuCAS is published as a Web service, created contexts and services are reusable. As a case study, RuCAS is applied to a real home network system.