An active functionality service for e-business applications

Abstract

Service based architectures are a powerful approach to meet the fast evolution of business rules and the corresponding software. An active functionality service that detects events and involves the appropriate business rules is a critical component of such a service-based middleware architecture. In this paper we present an active functionality service that is capable of detecting events in heterogeneous environments, it uses an integral ontology-based approach for the semantic interpretation of heterogeneous events and data, and provides notifications through a publish/subscribe notification mechanism. The power of this approach is illustrated with the help of an auction application and through the personalization of car and driver portals in Internet-enabled vehicles.