Employing collective intelligence for user driven service creation

With advances in computing technologies and active user participation through smart devices such as the iPhone and Android, user needs are becoming varied and complex. It is quite natural, then, that a single Web service may not be sufficient to fully satisfy the diverse goals of users in their daily lives. A set of cohesively connected Web services/mashups may be able to deal with these goals. An increasing number of open APIs can facilitate various types of service compositions with users as the service creators. Recently, Internet, telecommunications, and third-party providers have opened their services to the public in the form of open APIs, a trend following the Web 2.0 paradigm. However, most service creation environments do not have sufficient knowledge (particularly, available services and their functionality) to support service creation by users. The problem of knowledge scarcity is that users may have difficulty in finding relevant open APIs for a given situation, finally resulting in rather straightforward types of service. In this article we present two kinds of collective intelligence for user-driven service creation: the user´s own experiences in service composition, and activity knowledge from the web. These collective intelligence types will aid in creating enduser service compositions by enforcing knowledge support in terms of user experiences and activity-aware functional semantics, and will finally accelerate the development of various kinds of converged applications. Using the beneficial roles of collective intelligence as key enablers of future service creation environments, this article also shows a new potential for user-driven composite services within the next few years.