A User-Aware Approach to Provide Adaptive Web Services

Abstract

Web services are rapidly gaining acceptance as a fundamental technology in the web fields. They are becoming the cutting edge of communication between the different applications all over the web. Because of today's wide diversity of devices to- gether with the variety of the user's preferences, context-aware web services are becom- ing a fundamental challenge that must be targeted. This issue is a part of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline and it aims at adapting the web service behavior according to the user's context such as his specific work environment, language, type of Internet connection, devices and preferences. Many solutions have been proposed in this area. Nevertheless, the adaptation was carried out only at the runtime and it partially covered the user's general context. In this paper, we introduce a new context-aware approach that provides adaptive web services. Our approach allows to express require- ments by taking into account potential user's profile in addition to the functional one. While the latter ensures the description of the web service-functionalities, adaptation expresses the ability of a service to be self-adapted to runtime context changes. Our approach deals with adaptation from the very beginning of the modeling step of a web service. Furthermore, it upgrades description and publication usual methods in order to support profile specification.