D7: Context Aspect-Sensitive Service Container

Thomas Cottenier, Illinois Institute of Technology
Tzilla Elrad, Illinois Institute of Technology
Andrew Prunicki, Illinois Institute of Technology

Wednesday, March 16, 14:00
Thursday, March 17, 14:00

Many of the shortcomings of current Web Service composition mechanisms stem from the difficulty of defining, modularizing and managing service behavior that is dependent on the context of service invocation.

The Contextual Aspect-Sensitive Service (CASS) model proposes a novel service composition methodology, based on dynamic service refinement through contextual aspect weaving. Contextual aspects encapsulate the distributed structure and the collaborative behavior of composite web services, as well as invocation context dependent behavior.

The CASS container avoids the need for a centralized orchestration engine and enables on-demand service instance customization. Its service collaboration- based specification language offers a powerful alternative to static and centralized business process specification languages.

This demonstration highlights the capability of the CASS container to instantiate distributed contextual aspects on-the-fly. First, the demonstration shows how service orchestration structure and dynamic behavior are expressed in the CASS specification. Second, the context- dependent service refinement capability is illustrated by a highly dynamic search engine application in which service orchestration is dynamically reconfigured according to the client context. Finally, the demonstration points out the more advanced capabilities of the CASS model and tools and shows how complex service interaction patterns such as mobile agent-based behavior are implemented and specified in the container.