Providing web services to mobile users: The architecture design of an m-service portal Minder Chen - Dongsong Zhang - Lina Zhou Presented by: Juan M. Cubillos IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies

2 Outline 1.Introduction 2.Concepts 1.Web Services 2.M-services 3.Technical Infrastructure of m-services 4.Classification of m-services 5.M-Service Portal 6.E-procurement m-service Portal 7.Intelligent m-services 8.Discussion 9.Questions

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies3 1.Introduction “Many organizations have moved their business online in order to achieve competitive advantages by reducing cost, increasing customer satisfaction, enhancing business collaboration and partnership, and extending service offerings.” The use of web services is increasing rapidly as the need for application-to-application communication and interoperability grows. With the latest advance in mobile computing and communication technologies, we are beginning to see a variety of wireless applications using web services (m- services).

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies4 1.Introduction – Paper Structure Concepts of Web Service & m-services Technical Architecture of an m-service portal Intelligent m-service architecture Research Issues - Relationship between them - Classification Matrix A prototype e-procurement m-service is developed to exemplify the architecture Enhance the service searching and matching - Semantic Web Services - Context-aware applications

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies5 2.Concepts (1/4) Web services: “Loosely coupled software components delivered over internet-based technologies”. [Gartner, 2001]. Loosely coupled implies that web services are independent of any programming languages, platforms, and object models. Four technologies: –XML  Extensible Markup Language –SOAP  Simple Object Access Protocol –WSDL  Web Services Description Language –UDDI  Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies6 2.Concepts (2/4) The term Web Service describes a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an Internet protocol backbone. XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the data, WSDL is used for describing the services available and UDDI is used for listing what services are available.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies7 2.Concepts (3/4) The service-oriented web services architecture

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies8 2.Concepts (4/4) The term m-service extends the concept of web services to the wireless environment. It refers to requesting and running web services on wireless devices. Four mandatory characteristics: –Transportable through wireless networks. –Flexible in terms of composition with other m-services. –Adaptable according to wireless devices’ computing characteristics. –Accessible by wireless devices via a micro browser as a mobile web application or able to interact with a mobile client software component that consumes web services.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies9 3.Technical Infrastructure (1/2) A wireless environment for m-services

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies10 Why mobile portals Benefits of m-services Clients –Mobile web clients –Mobile local clients Application Servers –Content adaptation or transcoding services –Notification services 3. Technical Infrastructure (2/2)

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies11 4.Classification of m-services Classification of mobile services

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies12 5.M-service Portal (1/3) An m-service portal architecture

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies13 5.M-service Portal (2/3) Major components –List manager: Maintains a personalized list of Pre- configured m-services. –Profiler: Is responsible for storing personal information and preferences such as financial profiles, health and insurance profiles, etc. –Agency: Use intelligent agent technologies to reduce unnecessary interaction between m-services and the mobile user. Based on user’s information, agents can proactively collect relevant services and information on behalf of users.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies14 5.M-service Portal (2/3) Other essential elements –Set of building-block web services: They are common basic web services required by most m-services applications. –M-service registries: Contains a list of services published by m-service providers. –Group of m-service providers: They develop and host m-services particularly useful for mobile users.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies15 6.E-procurement m-service Portal (1/3) Prototype that the authors developed in the context of m-service portal. It allows purchasing personnel to inquire product prices from suppliers and to place an order from a mobile device connected to the internet. This e-procurement m-service application allows employees to replenish an inventory while they are checking it in a warehouse.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies16 6.E-procurement m-service Portal (2/3) (a) The home page of the m-service prototype. (b) Selecting e-procurement from the list manager. (c) Entering a product ID to inquire prices from vendors via the QueryPrice web service.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies17 6.E-procurement m-service Portal (3/3) (d) Only displays the offered prices from two different suppliers in the ascending order. (e) If the user selects a price, a page with a link to detailed information and a link to the ProductOrdering service will be displayed. (f) If the Detail link is selected from (e), the detailed product-offering page will be displayed.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies18 7.Intelligent m-services (1/4) Definition: A combination of web services and intelligent agents is expected to re- shape the future service industries by encouraging the federation of workforces among organizations. Distributed heterogeneous intelligent agents can interact with each other in various ways such as peer-to-peer and agent-mediated manners.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies19 7.Intelligent Services (2/4) Personal agents facilitate service discovery and use. Composition agents search and aggregate multiple m-services before returning them to a personal agent.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies20 7.Intelligent Services (3/4) Achieving the goal of combining agent technology and m-services presents many challenges, including semantic interoperability, agent-based collaboration, service customization, as well as automated and flexible service discovery and transaction across the network. Challenges: –To make services understandable by heterogeneous agents. –To enable mapping between different annotations of web services

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies21 7.Intelligent Services (4/4) Adding semantics to service annotations can reduce ambiguity in interpreting service information and improve both quality and quantity of e-commerce transactions. The semantic web provides an infrastructure to support a service description language that improves query matching, negotiation proposals and agreement, and advertisement. Therefore, a mechanism needs to be established to: –Enhance the description and composition of web services and the representation of users’ profiles and preferences. –Support the process of searching for m-services.

IS 707 Applications of Intelligent Technologies22 8.Discussion Fact: –M-services are still in a very early stage. Issues: –Platform interoperability. –Context-aware m-services. –Mobile client caching. –Security. Interesting Points: –BPEL  provides a standard way of specifying web service composition. –Integration of semantic web research with emerging web service standards.

9.Questions