Coordination for the Internet of Services: a user-centric approach

In the evolving ubiquitous Internet landscape, users are willing to play a more central role by modeling and reshaping the Web experience upon their needs. They begin perceiving and exploiting the Web as a platform to collaboratively create and share contents and to communicate with each other. Moreover, they want to decide how to access services and contents, freeing themselves from traditional fixed PCs and adopting heterogeneous wireless devices such as palmtops, smartphones, wireless-enabled portable audio players and so on. The Internet of Services scenario stresses several research fields, from multimodality to mobility, from context awareness to service orientation and coordination. Research achievements, anyway, often tend to evolve separately, leading to ad-hoc solutions for specific sets of problems. We strongly believe that such evolving scenarios require a comprehensive support platform: this paper promotes a novel service-oriented middleware to assist users in the pervasive ubiquitous Internet access. The use cases we describe focus on complex scenarios that, in our opinion, will likely be more and more required in the next years.