A Support System for Designing Ubiquitous Service Composition Scenarios

Ubiquitous service composition provides new services and applications seamlessly by establishing cooperation among any devices in home networks and any services in service provider networks. Since users can utilize whichever of these entities they want at a particular moment, they will be inspired to determine what kinds of entities they want to use as service components and, by themselves, design how those entities are orchestrated. However, designing a composite service scenario is difficult for the majority of general users because it requires professional skills related to Web service technology, data flow, programming languages, etc. In addition, there is the specialized problem of matching the different interfaces of the service components. We are developing a novel scenario design support system that includes service flow information, which adds a semantic description of data flow and control structure for two or more sequential service components in order to generate composite scenarios including those service components. It conceals the above difficulties and flexibly describes the interface binding. We implemented the system and evaluated it in terms of the reusability of interface binding and the user-friendliness for general users.