Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
include: education, lifestyle, nationality, religion, political affiliation, culture and
skills. To cope with these diversities, we need a comprehensive modeling framework
to capture and understand theseuser diversities and to predict users' needs and
preferences accordingly.
Strategic actors modeling framework
i*
could be used to understand the user's
preferences towards certain kinds of web-services. However, current
i*
modeling
lacks of an explanation for the origin of the users' diverse needs and preferences.We
extend the actor concept in the
i*
modelling framework to express the user diversity
in the IT Service environment.
i*
will also be introduced to capture modeling these
services related user diversity.
2.1 Actors in Service Environment
In the strategic actor modeling framework,
i*
, system players are modeled on three
different abstraction levels, namely, role, position, and agent [16]. Putting the actor
concept into the web service environment, the meaning of three different levels of
actors in the i* modeling framework can be further clarified to model various service
users on different abstraction levels.
Fig. 1.
Mapping service actors
•
Service role
: In the definition of
i*
modeling language, a role is defined as “an
abstract characterization of the behavior of a social actor within some specialized
context or domain of endeavor.” [16] Particularly, a role in the web service context
could be interpreted as the behavior of a specific group of users towards a certain
functionalities of service. For example:
Role
[
map serviceuser
],
Role
[
transportation serviceuser
]
•
Social Position
: Normally, the term social position is used to represent the social
status of an individual. In the service setting, the concept of social position extends
