A generic user innovation toolkit architecture for mobile service creation

Abstract

This article introduced an architecture for user innovation toolkits in the domain of mobile services. However, the architecture is generic and flexible enough to cover various classes of digital services (e.g. web services, E-Mail services, car driver assistance services, etc). The architecture consists of several components, namely a user interaction component that handles the interaction with toolkit users, a model generator component that manages an internal representation of a user's service design, a model verifier component that verifies this representation, two model translator components that serve as a toolkit's interface to external software development processes, and a model execution server that is capable of executing a service. For an implementation of this architecture three key technologies were suggested: Web services technology for the realization of service units, BPEL for the realization of service unit compositions, and UML as a means to represent service designs as software engineering models. Subsequently, the architecture's main concepts such as the adaptation to different target user groups and the refinement of service designs on different levels of abstraction were demonstrated. For this purpose, a fictitious situation was described in which a user experiences needs for certain mobile services and then uses a toolkit, which is built upon the proposed architecture and technologies, to create and refine these services. Even though the solution spaces in the concept demonstration are quite restricted, such a toolkit's potential for innovation should have become apparent. This potential increases exponentially with the number of service units provided and with the power of the implemented composition mechanism for those units. It remains for future research to explore in more detail the possibilities for implementing and utilizing this architecture, particularly in other domains than the mobile service domain. © 2006 Springer Berlin · Heidelberg.