A ubiquitous workflow service framework

Abstract

In ubiquitous environments, all services head for context-awareness to provide appropriate services for a user's situation. However, it is hard to implement all kinds of things related to context managements. In this paper we propose a ubiquitous workflow service framework, named uFlow, based on a structural context model and uWDL, which is a ubiquitous workflow description language. Service developers can easily describe context-aware services using the uFlow framework so long as they only select available services based on Web Services and describe context information as a transition condition of workflow services. In order to verify the effectiveness of the uFlow framework, we designed and implemented a service scenario described with uWDL, and demonstrated that the scenario provides users with appropriate services according to a user's situation in ubiquitous computing environments.