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Service contracts: Coordination of user-adaptation in Open Service Architectures

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Abstract

An Open Service Architecture (OSA) is a framework that supports an open set of users to subscribe to, and possibly pay for an open set of services. Today, the World Wide Web (WWW) is the most successful example of an OSA. Nevertheless, the WWW provides poor support for personalised services, since services cannot collaborate unless handcrafted to do so. We present a framework that allows independent, personalised services to coordinate their adaptations to individual users. The framework is described in terms of service contracts in an agent architecture. We first describe the general notion of service contracts, and then the particulars of service contracts used for adaptation coordination. Adaptation coordination addresses a crucial issue for OSAs: that of providing users with homogeneous interaction with heterogeneous services. We suggest that this is done by introducing a separate adaptation coordination agent, which orchestrates how the individual services are personalised.

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Correspondence to Annika Waern.

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Bylund, M., Waern, A. Service contracts: Coordination of user-adaptation in Open Service Architectures. Personal Technologies 2, 188–199 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01321175

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