Understanding the Diversity of Services Based on Users’ Identities - Advanced Information Systems Engineering - page 613

the positionconcept in i* by referring to aggregations of social roles[7]. It covers
not only the organizational perspectives, but also other community-relatedsocial
roles and social relations among a group of people. For instance, in the Olympic
Games setting, there are:

Position [ coach ], Position [ athlete ]

One could have more than one social position at a time, and social positions all
come together with concrete background settings, such as affiliations, certain
events or related groups. Different social positions may lead to different user needs
and preferences. When there are conflicts between social positions, the actor could
compare to find the most important position along with its related events, and
select the services accordingly. The importance ofeach particular social
positioncould vary as physical context changes.

• Individual Agent : In the original i* modeling framework where agent is defined as

“an actor with concrete, physical manifestations, such as human individual.”
[16].In the service environment, individual agent emphasizes on users, as executers
and decision makers of pre-defined services.

Agent [ Jim ], Agent [ John ]

Agent Attributes : Agent Attributes represent Individual Agent's personal
attributes, e.g. age, gender, religion, education level, etc. These agent attributes are
comparatively stable and do not change very often.Once the participation of an
agent in a social relation relinquishes, the obtained knowledge and history will be
transformed into individual attributes.

Attribute [Jim, age]= 20 , Attribute [John, education]= PhD

We believeindividual agent's preferences most likely depend on his agent
attributes.Although some of these relationships could be clearly defined, most of
the agent attribute-preference relationships still remain latent or unknown.

• Agent Class: We use Agent Class to represent an abstract group of people who has

the same value for a certain agent attribute which could lead to similar service
needs or preferences. Such as:

John INS Agent Class [ vegetarian ]: Attribute [John, eating habit] = vegetarian

For instance, John is an athlete attending the Paralympics, being a vegetarian, and
wants to use the map service to find a nearest restaurant. In this scenario, he is a user
of the map service( Role [user [ map service ]]); his social position is athlete
( Position [ athlete ]); as individual agent, his name is John ( Agent [ John ]), who has a
group of concerned attributes: he is a vegetarian (belong to Agent Class [ vegetarian ]);
he is handicapped and uses a wheel chair (belong to Agent Class [ wheel chair
user ]).