End-user Composition of Web-based Services: The "Plus Alpha" Approach
The Web is truly becoming ubiquitous now that more and more people own a mobile device with a web browser. Many users want to exploit the fact that they can be online practically 24 hours a day, and they have ideas about what services they need. However, most of the users are not proficient in any programming language, so they are depending on a relatively small number of software engineers to help them create the desired services. This is slowing down the potential progress, and creating a need for better ways to involve users in their own service development. In this paper, we first present a method for end user-based service composition which is developed in the UbiCompForAll project. Thereafter, we investigate the effect of making a small incremental (plus alpha) improvement to an existing scenario. As a showcase, we use the “Doctor’s appointment” scenario to illustrate how end users can be involved in the creation of web-based services for themselves. The plus alpha scenario clarifies that newly achieved service compositions can significantly profit from previous ones by reusing existing building blocks.
Sætre Rune, Khan Mohammad Ullah, Peter Herrmann (2011). End-user Composition of Web-based Services: The "Plus Alpha" Approach. Proc. of INWWCT 2011, pp. 51-61, TAPIR trykk, ISBN 978-82-519-2837-3.