Personalized Mobile Web Service Discovery

Abstract

Mobile devices with their various form factors have become the most convenient and pervasive computing platform, whether to carry out everyday business or to get online. Mobile users tend to adopt the fast food trend even in consuming online mobile services and functionalities. The Web service approach promises great flexibility in offering software functionality over the network, while maintaining interoperability between heterogeneous platforms. However, the diversity that exists in mobile devices and their platforms with variations in capabilities present unique challenges in developing services that can accommodate such diversity. Recent years have witnessed the rise of user-facing service developments that can be consumed on the go with standard interface, such as RESTful Web services. However, the discovery of such services does not match their growing popularity. In addition, existing discovery approaches lack supporting mechanisms that ensure the proper functioning of discovered services within the user context and failing to match personal preferences. This paper introduces personalized Web service discovery for mobile environments. Preliminary results show that incorporating user preferences and context significantly improves the overall precision of service discovery.