UCSI Towards a User-Centric Service Integration Approach

Service Integration plays an important role in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).With the thriving of SOA, many approaches have been proposed to address the issue. Several languages or specifications are introduced for the definition of integration plan, such as WSFL, BPML and BPEL4WS. And many recent researches employ semantic web techniques to enable the automatic service discovery and interoperation, OWL-S included. Most of the existing approaches are originally introduced for application developers or programmers to use, in which user requirement is usually expressed based on the services themselves. However, a service may be very complex, the functions of which are usually the composite and interconnection of several basic functions. It is sometimes difficult for normal users without developing skills to understand the services and then utilize them to define the integration solution. In the paper, we think that, the most familiar things for normal users are the functions they need and the working process they expect. Based on the intuitive idea, we propose a normal User-Centric Service Integration approach (UCSI). In the approach, a set of function elements are predefined for each specified service domain and three working process notations are introduced to model the relationships between function elements. Then user requirement and service function can both be represented as function elements interconnection based on the process notations. With the representation, the functionality relationship between user requirement and services can be resolved and the service integration solutions can be generated. Normal users with certain knowledge of specified service domains can try using the approach to achieve personalized service integration. And a prototype system is introduced in the end.