Putting Services in Context Danijel Novakovic, Christian Huemer Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems Vienna University of Technology Vienna, Austria {novakovic, huemer}@big.tuwien.ac.at Abstract—Business transactions between companies are more and more executed by a flow of well-defined electronic business documents. The resulting inter-organizational business processes are often realized by concepts known from service-oriented computing. Exchanging a business document corresponds to a service call and the input/output of the service calls commonly follows a certain business document standard. However, these standards typically present the superset of all required elements used in any business context. In a specific context (in a specific industry, in a specific geopolitical region, etc.) the input/output is adjusted to this context by constraints on the generic structure. Accordingly, a specific service is always used in a specific context. It follows that it is important to define the business context of a service (in a structured format). For this purpose we have developed the Business Context Ontology model (BCOnt). In this paper we elaborate on the theoretical concepts and the underlying algorithms as well as on their implementation in practice. Keywords—business context; ontology based business context model; (semi-) automatic generation of e-business documents I. I NTRODUCTION Context is today widely exploited in pervasive systems, the most often in case when mobile devices apply a user location to perform different computations. However, in this paper we describe how a contextual knowledge could be harnessed in a different domain. It is the domain of inter-organizational business processes where business documents are exchanged between business partners thereby synchronizing their own private business processes. Therefore, development of new techniques which can be used to speed up the generation of these documents and to avoid heterogeneous interpretations of the exchanged data contents is essential for a reliable and efficient execution of the today’s complex business ecosystems. This paper describes our approach to apply the contextual knowledge for (semi-) automatically generating implementa- tion guidelines of business documents. An implementation guideline represents a context specific constraint of the un- derlying generic document standard. More precisely, in the work explained in this paper we consider business documents built upon the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) document standard [1]. These documents are exchanged between business partners when executing inter-organizational business processes. In our previous research [2], we have introduced the Business Context Ontology model (BCOnt) to formally rep- resent business context (BC). Furthermore, in [3] we have established the theoretical foundations to contextualize already existing semantically interoperable data building blocks, so- called Core Components, by means of this model. In the following we additionally tailor this approach and prove that it does not hold only in theory, but in practice as well. Therefore, we develop the corresponding implementation algorithms and show how these algorithms can be integrated in an applicable system. The proposed service oriented architecture exploits business contextual information to re-use the already existing Core Components during the development of new BC aware business document implementation guidelines. Our concurrent research [4], [5] addresses the same problem using the En- hanced Unified Context (E-UCM) model. In order to easy the understanding and future comparisons between our two approaches, in the following we try, when it is possible, to describe the BCOnt model by adapting the corresponding terminology and relevant examples used in [4] and [5] for the explanation of the E-UCM model. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. First, Section II presents our BC definition, gives an overview of the UN/CEFACT document standard and describes the main pillars of the BCOnt model. In Section III we explain our approach to utilize the contextual information contained by Core Components and to (semi-) automatically model new im- plementation guidelines of business documents. In Section IV we present our implementation of the proposed conceptual solution. We elucidate clearly the key features of the most important services provided by the underlying architecture and show how these services can be implemented by our described algorithms. Finally, Section V concludes the paper and gives an outlook on future research directions. II. RELATED AND PREVIOUS WORK A. Business Context The relevant scientific literature ([6], [7], etc.) describes context as an enumeration of examples, such as: location, time, temperature, or in terms of relevant synonyms, such as: user environment, application surroundings, user situation. Starting from the outcomes of our general survey on BC presented in [8] and considering one of the most applied context understandings proposed by Dey and Abowd [6] to the domain of the modern business where different business process are interrelated, we have defined BC in the following way: BC is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity within a scope where business oper- ates. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a business process and a business environment, including the business process and business environments themselves. The entities which are introduced by our BC definition can be described by different attributes, where each of these