A Context Lifecycle for Web-Based Context Management Services

During the development of context aware applications a context management component must traditionally be created. This task requires specialist context lifecycle management expertise and hence can be a significant deterrent to application development. It also removes the developers focus from differentiation of their application to an oft repeated development task. This issue can be addressed by encapsulating the context management lifecycle within a web-service, thus providing applications with a low-overhead alternative to managing their context data. The adoption of a web-based approach maximizes the potential number of interacting applications, including smart spaces, web and mobile applications, due to ease of access and widespread support of web technologies. The contribution of this paper is the development of a lifecycle, based on existing work on enterprise data and context aware lifecycles, which is optimized for web-based context management services (WCXMS) and the provision of a web-service implementation of the lifecycle.