Forschungsthemen
[GB] Collaboration-Based Service-Oriented Architecture
The advent of the Internet as an infrastructure for the distribution business processes and applications among various stakeholders in different places of the world have lead to a paradigm change from centralized Client-Server Architectures to distributed, loosely coupled Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The latter architectural style is based on the notion of a service as a self-contained, logical representation of a recurring activity. In particular, a service acts as a black-box with a well-defined interface, result, and quality properties. Unfortunately, the next paradigm shifting technology is here to stay, mobile and ubiquitous devices.
The wide spread use of mobile and embedded devices pave the way for new application scenarios and use cases where contextual information (e.g. system properties, preferences, location, time, etc.) are used to adapt the application. SOAs, however, are not apt for fine grained adaption of services to the specific needs of a particular client. This results in increased development effort, because each service client must provide multiple context-dependent adapters for each required service. Furthermore, it is impossible for the developer to foresee all possible situations of service adaption. In conclusion, current implementations of SOAs are not suited for fine grained adaption of a service to the particular needs of a client.
Problem Definition: Current SOA implementations treat services as a black box whose behavior and interface cannot be adapted to the particular needs of a particular client. This hinders the support of unforeseen context-dependent adaption. Consequently, there is a need for an approach able to design a service architecture which allows context-dependent service reconfiguration and adaption to the needs of a specific client while retaining the behavior towards all other clients.
Betreuer: Thomas Kühn