Having services your way!: Towards user-centric composition of mobile services

Abstract

Mobile phones are becoming an essential tool in our life. They not only act as phones and media players, but more fundamentally they give us access to variety of services that we use in everyday life, including social networking, personal assistance, entertainment, travelling, and so on. Unfortunately, while the number of services increases, each service is narrowly directed to solve a specific user task with no attention to how the user may utilize these services in combination. At this stage, the combination of services and the integration of their information flows must be managed by the user on his own, in a handcrafted way.To support the user in the composition of services and applications, we propose to organize the services around a small set of resources - time, location, social relations, money - which model the essential user assets handled by mobile services, and which guide the data integration and service composition.In the paper, we discuss our current realization of such resource-based, user-centric service composition approach, detailing the underlying conceptual architecture and discussing the actual execution of the platform on a set of practical scenarios. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.