A service-based context management framework for cross-enterprise collaboration.

The more service based applications appear in different business areas such as Location Based Services (LBS) and Field Service Management (FSM), the more important it becomes to support context-awareness in service based systems. Exposition, collection, management and consumption of context information are the main processes to be addressed in a service based context management framework. This paper presents a framework, namely CoSCo, tackling these processes to enrich service applications with context-aware decisions. The presented framework follows the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. Adopting SOA eases the deployment of our framework into highly dynamic environments where the source of context information can show high level of variability. As a general guideline, we also provide an empirical study of our framework to elicit the performance with different deployment scenarios. The results of our study can help system administrators deploy systems with different capabilities. A context-aware calendar application built by using our framework is also presented at the end of the paper.