Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6 Conclusion and Discussion
We have outlined an approach for modeling and analyzing diversities of web service
users. The approach is based on social and intentional analysiscentered on actor's
social and personal identities under different contexts.It allows us to go beyond
mechanistic behavior, to deal with the opportunistic and rationaledecision making of
strategic actors. Interdependencies among actors' identitybring opportunities as well
as place constraints on their service privileges. Strategic actors seek to achieve goals
(hard and soft) by obtaining new identities from service providers, taking into account
the opportunities and disadvantages arising from various casual relationships, as
illustrated in the examples.
Our approach is complementary to existing frameworks and techniques in service
personalization and context-aware service provision. Weemphasizethat the systematic
analysis of relationships among social rolesand personal background for a given
individual actor may play an essential role in eliciting needs for service users. It
supports the exploration and management of service alternatives, based on a balanced
consideration of all competing requirements, thus complementing the various
solutions of recent service selection and adaptation techniques.
While this paper has outlined some basic modeling concepts, much remains to be
done.To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we are currently
developing an application for integrating online banking information services based
on user's uniquebackground and settings.
There are also several options to further extend our initial approach. Identity
management is increasingly connected with other activities in enterprise management.
The proposed diversity rationalization approach provides a way of linking identity
related analysis to serviceneeds analysis and technology configuration analysis. The
conceptual modeling approach can thus provide a unifying framework for service
broker systems, supporting decision making and the management of changes across
technical services development, business services model development, and identity
management.
Meanwhile, there is also much potential in the synergy between social position
modeling and the foundational principles in context modeling. For example, in
analyzing the implications of an identity, one would like to model the inter-
relatedness among their subject matters. The interaction between social concepts and
relationships (actors, goals, preferences) and physical ones (e.g., processes,
information assets, time, etc.) need to be detailed. Libraries of domain knowledge,
service design knowledge with regard to identity management and context
management would be very helpful during modeling and analysis. These are topics of
ongoing and future research.
References
1.
Sutcliffe, A., Fickas, S., Sohlberg, M.M.: Personal and ContextualRequirements
Engineering. Proceedings. In: 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements
Engineering, pp. 19-30 (2005)
2.
Baldauf, M., Dustdar, S., Rosenberg, F.: A survey on context-aware systems. International
Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing 2(4), 263-277 (2007)
