UNNOTI: Toolkit for Rural Service Modeling

Abstract

Services science aims towards suggesting methodological and tool support for managing services for various application scenarios. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the services science vision can be realized by using formal modeling and analysis techniques for the design of functionality of any kind, irrespective of the context whether such functionality is delivered on computing platforms or by humans. The service management problem is discussed in rather an unusual context of rural service management in developing nations. This choice of domain is motivated by two factors. The fact that such a domain is rarely referred in existing literature, it presents greater modeling and analysis challenges. The success of the proposed methodology in such context would pave the way towards applying the same to any other services setting. Besides, success in this domain can have significant social impact. Three specific results are documented in this paper. First, it is demonstrated how rural service architectures can be effectively modeled. Second, it is proposed how a QoS monitoring infrastructure might be devised for this domain (addressing special challenges, such as the need to reliably estimate component measures from more aggregated measures). Lastly, it is discussed how sophisticated QoS monitoring (leveraging techniques from complex event processing) can be used to trigger, and constrain, service redesign, leading to an integrated service design life-cycle. In addition this paper introduces UNNOTI, a simple and effective online form based toolkit for Service modeling, QoS monitoring, and service redesign which manages a repository of service designs, and the custom-designed functionality for QoS monitoring and estimation, as well as service proximity analysis, the tool uses the Prover9 first-order logic theorem prover for performing the goal realization test that is required for service redesign. The toolkit developed for modeling agricultural procurement services and can be applicable to model other rural services. The toolkit is developed using JSP and MYSQL in Windows environment.