CASD: Management of a context-aware service directory

Traditional web service discovery is strongly related to the use of service directories. Especially in the case of mobile web services, where both service requestors and providers are mobile, the dynamics impose the need for directory-based discovery. Context plays an eminent role with mobility, as a filtering mechanism that enhances service discovery through the selection of the most appropriate service. However, current service directory specifications do not focus on mobility of services or context-awareness. In this paper, we propose CASD, a context-aware service directory, envisioned as a context-based index for services on top of any traditional service directory, and design algorithms for construction, search, update and merge of such directories. Furthermore, we describe the architecture of our system for context-aware service discovery, we present a prototype implementation and discuss the experimental results as well as the overall evaluation. The contribution of this work is the proposal for a novel, enhanced representation model for a context-aware service directory.