Service creation for end-users

Abstract

The current computing and communication services are driven by various technologies. The creation of such services is however not an easy task. The different platforms lack openness that simplifies interoperability. Service development is still mainly technical oriented, where service creation tools are meant for serving and assisting the professional developers. Service creation is not seen as a task for end users right now. In this paper we will discuss how end users could be enabled to create new services, shown on the example within a mobile context-aware service platform. This is achieved by introducing the concept of the technology agnostic approach into the process. We present the conceptual architecture and explain the idea of end-user driven service creation that can provide a solution. Several tools were designed and implemented to prove that the concepts work. With the help of semantic service description, the end users can express their service wishes and create services using a graphical interface technology agnostically. The idea was implemented in two European projects and we have identified the next steps to improve the prototypes as well as the idea. Based on several tools and an underlying platform the ideas have been tested in a development environment for mobile context-aware services. Here end-users are able to design their own services or combine existing services, which can be shared and used by other users later on.