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 ontologybased approach for the semantic interpretation of

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... 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.