Achieving Service Dependability Through Context-Awareness

By large-scale services (LSS) we understand IT services that are being deployed over unbounded large-scale infrastructures. Typical examples may be found in e-commerce scenarios, in computational Grids, or in ubiquitous computing environments. The more such services will be composed on the fly from other services the more dependability becomes a challenge. Service dependability is about error processing and fault tolerance. There are operational similarities between error processing and context provisioning in ubiquitous computing. In this paper we are exploring the beneficials of applying context-awareness to the dependable composition of services. Based on an e-commerce scenario we analyze the similarities between error processing and context provisioning, but we also show how the single phases of these processes translate into each other. We address how service dependability may benefit from context-awareness and we finally report on a prototypical implementation of a Web Services based context provisioning framework.