A Survey on Service Composition Middleware in Pervasive Environments

The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments

Dynamic service composition for telecommunication services and its challenges

As communication networks have evolved towards IP (Internet Protocol) networks, telecommunication operators has expanded its reach to internet multimedia web content services while operating circuit-switch networks in parallel. With the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that enables service capability interfaces to be published and integrated with other service capabilities into new composite service, service composition allows telecommunication providers to accelerate more new services provisioning. From the perspective of telecommunication providers to deliver integrated composite service from different providers and different network protocols, this paper is aimed to present the current service composition based on middleware approaches; discuss the requirements of meeting the challenges; and compare the approaches

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Rule-based Reasoning Mechanism for Context-aware Service Presentation

With universal usability geared towards user focused customisation, a context reasoning engine can derive meaning from the various context elements and facilitate decision-taking for applications and context delivery mechanisms. The heterogeneity of available device capabilities means that the recommendation algorithm must be in a formal, effective and extensible form. Moreover, user preferences, capability context and media metadata must be considered simultaneously to determine appropriate presentation format. Towards this aim, this paper presents a reasoning mechanism that supports service presentation through a rule-based mechanism. The validation of the approach is presented through application use cases

Architectural support for ubiquitous access to multimedia content

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Telecomunicações). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Multimodal Generic Framework for Multimedia Documents Adaptation

Today, people are increasingly capable of creating and sharing documents (which generally are multimedia oriented) via the internet. These multimedia documents can be accessed at anytime and anywhere (city, home, etc.) on a wide variety of devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. The heterogeneity of devices and user preferences has raised a serious issue for multimedia contents adaptation. Our research focuses on multimedia documents adaptation with a strong focus on interaction with users and exploration of multimodality. We propose a multimodal framework for adapting multimedia documents based on a distributed implementation of W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces applied to ubiquitous computing. The core of our proposed architecture is the presence of a smart interaction manager that accepts context related information from sensors in the environment as well as from other sources, including information available on the web and multimodal user inputs. The interaction manager integrates and reasons over this information to predict the user’s situation and service use. A key to realizing this framework is the use of an ontology that undergirds the communication and representation, and the use of the cloud to insure the service continuity on heterogeneous mobile devices. Smart city is assumed as the reference scenario

Composition of context aware mobile services using a semantic context model

Context-awareness has been regarded as an important feature for mobile services. However, only a few services are sensible to context and the features that are context-aware are still limited. Composition of Web services has received much interest in business-to-business or enterprise application, but not so much interest in business-to- consumer applications. This paper presents iCas, a novel architecture that enables the creation of context-aware services on the fly, and discusses its main components. We compare our approach with similar systems and point out the main differences and advantages. To explore context-awareness to support service composition, iCas uses SeCoM, a semantic model to represent context. The main parts of this model are explained as well the advantages of using a semantic model to represent context. We also describe the use of our approach in an university campus to provide pedagogical features and assist the socio-pedagogical interaction of various types of users