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New content and service providers emerge every day. Each player offers new software components or services to support their technology. In these multi-vendor environments there is a genuine need for integration and interoperability. Integration and interoperability is a first step, once this is achieved components can seamlessly use services from different providers, and that is when service policies come into play. A policy mechanism allows fine grained control over the service usage. The OSGi Service Platform allows seamless integration of components and services but lacks a well defined mechanism for dynamic service policy management. Two approaches are presented for enhancing the OSGi Service Platform with policies. The first approach extends the platform while the second one adapts the plug-in components. Finally they are compared and evaluated against multiple requirements; usability, performance, transparency and backward compatibility.

In order to deliver intelligent context-aware services (e.g. notifications of nearby points of interest), Location Based Services are getting a lot of interest. However, deploying these services efficiently is currently hampered by the lack of enabling platforms, especially platforms taking advantage of easy service composition and flexible management.In this paper we detail the design of pCASE, a platform for enabling Context Aware Services. This platform allows easy deployment in both home and business premises and flexible management of complex services taking into account context information such as location and presence. A use case is presented: an intelligent call redirection service which dynamically (re)routes communication sessions depending on the location, occupation and social networks of users.The pCASE platform is designed to allow an easy deployment and management of services and a straightforward dynamic integration and combination of services and context information, both existing services and new services. The use of context information should be transparent to the application developers and the platform should not impose any performance restrictions on the developed and deployed services. The platform allows to add, modify or extend existing services using extra service components or context-providers without the need to adapt the existing components. For example, when new context providers are added, the new information should be automatically available and usable to the deployed services, thus supporting highly dynamic environments.