Towards a Conceptual Framework to Support Dynamic Service Provisioning for Non-Technical Service Clients

Recently, paradigms such as Service-Oriented and Pervasive Computing are being combined and applied in scenarios where users are surrounded by a plethora of computing devices and available services. Dealing with a potentially large number of devices and services can become overwhelming to users without appropriate software support. Moreover, in the case of non-technical users, an additional difficulty is to express service requests using technical concepts such as data types, XML documents, etc. In this paper we present a conceptual framework that aims at supporting the service provisioning for non-technical users, and we focus on the design and operation of the framework's software platform. The platform also makes use of computing devices that surround the users to collect contextual information that helps in the tasks of service discovery, selection and composition