A Modeling Language for Activity-Oriented Composition of Service-Oriented Software Systems

Abstract. The proliferation of smart spaces and emergence of new standards, such as Web Services, have paved the way for a new breed of software systems. Often the complete functional and QoS requirements of such software systems are not known a priori at design-time, and even if they are, they may change at run-time. Unfortunately, the majority of existing software engineering techniques rely heavily on human reasoning and manual intervention, making them inapplicable for automatic composition of such software systems at run-time. Moreover, these approaches are primarily intended to be used by technically knowledgeable software engineers, as opposed to domain users. In this paper, we present Service Activity Schemas (SAS), an activity-oriented language for modeling software system’s functional and QoS requirements. SAS targets service-oriented software systems, and relies on an ontology to provide domain experts with modeling constructs that are intuitively understood. SAS forms the centerpiece of a framework intended for user-driven composition and adaptation of service-oriented software systems in a pervasive setting. We provide a detailed description of SAS in the context of a case study and formally specify its structural and dynamic properties

Digitization and transmission of human experience

Transmission of human experience is essential for many purposes. It has two aspects: content and social relations. Digital technologies can solve some of the classic issues around the capture and transmission of human experience. Using these new technical affordances as a basis, this article presents a framework to capture and describe human activity and experience based on video and cooperative explicitation of activity trajectories with the subject, using a transition model inspired by the formalism of dynamical systems. The article also introduces this special issue, 'Digitize and Transfer', and gives an overview of its contents