Abstract
This chapter discusses Web environments that allow users to compose services in a visual manner, without the need to write programs. This is similar to the concept of visual programming. Visual service composition can potentially make service customization by end users a possibility. By empowering users to create their customized e-services, businesses can save a tremendous amount of resources in customization effort, and, at the same time, improve user satisfaction. This chapter discusses approaches for e-service composition and service discovery, the related concepts of service orchestration and choreography, and the technologies, languages, and tools involved during composition such as semantic service composition and ontologies, mashups, and environments such as Yahoo pipes. It concludes with a systematic overview of the functionality of consumer driven service composition tools and to propose a list of basic requirements for such tools.
TopE-Service Composition
With the proliferation of e-services in industries such as finance, health, travel, office, government, telecommunications and others, consumers are given the opportunity to combine existing services in order to create personalized and customized composite services. By having the ability to compose services visually rather than programmatically, users are able to concentrate on what the composed service is supposed to achieve rather than on how to achieve it.
The main benefits of user oriented service customization are:
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Companies can tap into unexplored user creativity for really innovative services.
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Reduced service development time and costs for the provider.
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New opportunities for creating new services from compositions of existing services.
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Increased productivity for service aggregators.
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The ability for the average end user to personalize and customize their own services.
Finally, since the human mind is visually oriented, and people are much better at recognizing things than recalling things, visual environments for composition may improve the effectiveness of the customization process.