The Human-Provided Services Framework

The collaboration landscape evolves rapidly by allowing people to participate in ad-hoc and process-centric collaborations. Thus, it is important to support humans in managing highly dynamic and complex interactions. The problem currently with managing interactions is that humans are unable to specify different interaction interfaces for various collaborations, nor able to indicate their availability to participate in collaborations. This paper introduces the Human-provided Services (HpS) framework, which allows users to provide services based on their skills and expertise. Such services can be used by human actors and software services in both ad-hoc and process-centric collaborations. With the HpS framework, people can offer multiple services and manage complex interactions, while requesters can find the right experts and available users for performing specific tasks. In this paper, we present the HpS middleware, which is the core of the HpS framework. We show how HpS services can be used in Web-scale ad-hoc collaboration scenarios.