Information Technology Reference
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pages can accommodate users from all over the world:e-commerce sitesprovide multi-
language product catalogue, and description tuned to regional requirements.
Cognitively impaired users with learning disabilities and poor memory can be
accommodated with modest changes in layout and controlled vocabulary. Expert and
frequent users could as well benefit fromcustomizations that speeds high-volume
users and macros to support repeated operations.
Literally, diversity can be defined as the characteristics that differentiate people as
individuals, as well as the characteristics which make them alike. It is considered to
indicate variety. In traditional product-oriented design, diversity assumes at least two
roles: build assurances of variety and choice into its processes and products, and it can
also be the source or catalyst for change. Most of the existing research in service
adaptation focuses on the physical aspect of the service's environmentand context,
e.g., time, location, as an origin of how users' needs changes. However, in addition to
the physical settings, human factors also play an important role in the formation,
change and evolution of the users' need.
In existing context-aware computing, context information is often pre-assumed to
include a limited number of variables, e.g., time, location, and run-time status of the
platform. Although a few context service frameworks [10] also consider the
preferences of users, there is a pressing need for frameworks and models to support
the analysis and design of complex social relationships and identities. We need to
understand where the diversities of users come from, how they determine user needs,
how they affect each other under different contexts, and how such information can be
used when making service selection, adaptation, and reconfiguration decisions.
In this paper, we propose an approach to further extend the strategic actors
modeling language
i*
to facilitate the analysis of user's identity information and the
underlining social context for Internet Services. Using this modeling approach, we are
able to represent different types of identities, social dependencies between identity
users and owners, service users and providers, and third party mediators. A reasoning
process linking the steps of analyzing user's identity, deriving service needs and
preferences, drilling down into service constraints, and making service selection and
adaptation is introduced. This modeling approach will help service vendors to provide
customizable solutions, user organizations to form integrated identity information
management solution, system operators and administrators to accommodate changes.
Typical scenarios of a map web service for users with diversified needs are used to
illustrate the proposed approach.
This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we extend the actor concept of the
i*
modelling framework and introduce an
i*
-Context to explain the social and identity
origin of the users' diverse needs in the internet service environment. In Section 3,
two scenarios are given to illustrate how the human factors of
i*
-Context will impact
the preference-based internet service selection and customization. Section 4
introduces our design for a web service selection and adaptation system. An Olympic
map service case study will also be presented to illustrate the reasoning process.
Finally, in Section 5 and 6, we review the related work, and conclude the paper with a
discussion of limitations and future directions.
2 Modeling User Diversity in Service Environment
There are many dimensions in human diversity that beyond obvious differences such
as race, gender, age, physical disabilities, and marital status. Less obvious dimensions
