Guided interaction: A mechanism to enable ad hoc service interaction

Phillipa Oaks () and Arthur Hofstede
Additional contact information
Phillipa Oaks: Queensland University of Technology
Arthur Hofstede: Queensland University of Technology

Information Systems Frontiers, 2007, vol. 9, issue 1, No 3, 29-51

Abstract: Abstract Ad hoc interaction between web services and their clients is a worthwhile but seemingly distant goal. At present, most of the interest in web services is focused on pre-planned B2B interaction. Clients interact with services using advance knowledge of the data and sequence requirements of the service and pre-programmed calls to their interfaces. This type of interaction cannot be used for ad hoc interaction between services and their clients such as mobile devices moving in and around rich dynamic environments because clients may not have the necessary knowledge in advance. For unplanned ad hoc interaction an interaction mechanism is required that does not require clients to have advance knowledge of programmatic service interfaces and interaction sequences. The mechanism must ensure clients with different resources and diverse competencies can successfully interact with newly discovered services by providing assistance such as disambiguation of terminology, alternative types of inputs, and context sensitive error reporting when necessary. This paper introduces a service interaction mechanism called guided interaction. Guided interaction is designed to enable clients without prior knowledge of programmatic interfaces to be assisted to a successful outcome. The mechanism is grounded in core computing primitives and based on a dialogue model. Guided interaction has two parts; the first part is a language for the exchange of information between services and their clients. The second part is a language for services to create interaction plans that allow them to gather the data they require from clients in a flexible way with the provision of assistance when necessary. An interpreter uses the plan to generate and interpret messages in the exchange language and to manage the path of the dialogue.

Keywords: Web services; Ad hoc; Guided; Interaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-006-9016-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:9:y:2007:i:1:d:10.1007_s10796-006-9016-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-006-9016-1

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().