Using personal information management infrastructures to facilitate user-generated services for personal use

Abstract

Ad-hoc and situational applications for personal use will gain more and more traction in the work support for knowledge workers (KWers). Personal information is a key element in these applications. Composition environments for situational applications like, e.g., Yahoo Pipes, enable end-users to compose services into an application targeting their individual problems. However, we analyze that these composition environments lack access for a KWer's personal information and require redundant development of services for common KWer activities. Addressing these issues, we present an infrastructure that manages the KWer's personal information consistently and thus provides services that serve as basis for enabling end-user driven service composition for application for personal use. The infrastructure consists of two key components, a basic personal information management system to maintain a KWer's personal information cloud in a unified and integrated form and domain-specific services that offer business logic for frequently occurring activities in applications for a KWer's personal use. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.