Designing a Collaborative Middleware for Semantic and User-Aware Service Composition

The large number of available services, provided by different means such as the Web, smartphone apps, and wearable devices, provides users a valuable support for their everyday activities, but at the same time introduces the need for a tailored choice and exploitation of them. Several approaches have been proposed that take into account users' preferences, but a comprehensive user-aware approach is still missing. In a previous work we proposed an approach that addressed the user-aware composition of services, in this paper we propose to extend the previous approach by considering also semantic techniques and simple collaboration aspects. So, we propose the definition of a middleware for composing and exploiting services that exhibits some key features: (i) it considers the profile of the users that exploit the service to choose appropriate services for them, (ii) it exploits techniques of semantic similarity between user and service descriptions to make the choice more effective, and (iii) it enables the collaboration among users. By means of a case study we present a possible scenario that can take advantage of our middleware, and we show how it can be exploited.