Leveraging Context-Awareness for Personalization in Enabling Context-Aware Web Services

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the approach followed by OPUCE for enabling user generated services in general and more precisely how context awareness is used to empower personalization and fine-grained adaptation of services for each single user. In particular, after a short presentation of the OPUCE project, section 2 addresses the modeling of the user context to cope with a highly volatile, yet heterogeneous and infinitely expansible set of information. Our reference architecture for embedding context awareness features in the core of our UGS platform is then described in section 3. Section 4 focuses on the solutions adopted to achieve the right level/trade off of explicit and implicit adaptation of services based on context information, both at service creation and service execution time, and also discusses the scalability, performance and privacy-related issues raised throughout the platform specification and development.