Web services user agent supporting interactions between mobile users and service flows

Abstract

Web services is already an infrastructure for practical e-Business. At the same time, mobile devices such as smart phones and PDAs are widely used by end-users these days. In this paper, we focus on interactions between Web services and the mobile devices during execution of a service flow. Frequent interactions decrease the usability of the service flow for the mobile users, and increase the total processing time and data amount. Thus, we propose an user agent who executes the service flow instead of the users. We first illustrate how the agent is automatically created for the service flow, then evaluate it on the user interaction, the processing time and the data amount. Finally we discuss its applicability to a standard Web services flow language, BPEL.