Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Understanding the Diversity of Services Based on Users'
Identities
Junjun Sun
1
, Feng Liu
1
, He Zhang
1
, Lin Liu
1,*
, and Eric Yu
2
Key Laboratory for Information System Security, Ministry of Education
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList)
1
School of Software, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
linliu@tsinghua.edu.cn
2
Faculty of Information, Toronto University, Toronto, Canada
Abstract.
Internet services involve complex networks of relationships among
users and providers - human and automated - acting in many different capacities
under interconnected and dynamic contexts. Due to the vast amount of
information and services available, it is not easy for novice users to identify the
right services that fit his purposes and preferences best. At the same time, it is
not easy for service providers to build a service with a customizable set of
features that satisfies the most people. This paper proposes to further extend the
strategic actors modeling framework
i*
to analyze the diverse needs of users by
modeling explicitly the personal characteristics, organizational positions, and
service related roles. We assume that service users' needs and preferences are
determined by their personal background, organizational roles, and the
immediate operational context in combination. In this way, the origin of the
diversity of service needs, quality preferences, and usage constraints, can be
ascribed and used as a basis to make rationale selection from currently available
types of services, and to reconfigure service interfaces and structures. Example
usage scenarios ofweb services are used to illustrate the proposed approach.
Keywords:
Personalization, Context, Service adaptation, i* modeling.
1 Introduction
To provide better web services for large scale social events, such as the Olympic
Games, or the World Expo, it is important to understand the needs of all involved
parties better. User populations of today's web services are becoming more
diversified, and it becomes difficult to identify a prototypical user. Diversity in this
sense refers to the variety in user needs which involves accommodating users with
different skills, knowledge, age, gender, disabilities, disabling conditions (mobility,
sunlight, noise), literacy, culture, income, and so on [12]. For example, designingweb
site interface needs to consider the users'computing skills and knowledge. Design of
search engines can include basic and advanced searches for different users. Web
*
Corresponding Author.
