A context ontology for service provisioning and consumption

Abstract

Nowadays services as those provided by smart cities, health smart services, as well as common services (e.g., telephonic services, e-mail services), have a great economic impact for organisations and represent an important mean to deliver value to their consumers. The malfunctions of both the services themselves as well as the entities responsible for their execution and consumption might cause economic losses, consumers' dissatisfaction and even shorten the service life cycle, among other risks. To avoid malfunctions beyond maintaining quality levels desired, it is important to take into account the widest possible context information that cause either positive or negative effects around services and entities involved in their provisioning and consumption. In this paper, we propose an upper ontology for service provisioning and consumption from a service-centric perspective. Specifically, we focus on software services, although we could argue for more generic applications. The contribution is the analysis, evaluation and reuse of existing proposals on context models to identify the strengths and weaknesses of its current status as well as to identify contexts not yet considered, and consolidate an integrated view of these proposals. The ultimate intention is to provide a well-defined and consolidated infrastructure of context information as a common body of knowledge, that could be instantiated on variety of use cases, for example, to be instantiated by monitors as context information useful to be monitored, or to be used as context information that allows knowing which contexts affect a service when a user consumes it, among others.