Enabling Ad-Hoc Interaction with Electronic Services

The internet is being used more and more for interactions between heterogeneous software systems. We are investigating how web-based electronic services can be dynamically located, composed into useful applications and executed at run-time to achieve pre-defined goals. We are looking at what is required to facilitate and automate dynamic interactions between independent electronic entities.

At present interaction between software services must be explicitly configured by application programmers, we describe a research direction that places the onus on electronic service providers to provide mechanisms to support dynamic ad-hoc interaction, somewhat similar to interactive customer service. In the real-world, customer service or facilitated interaction and usability are the factors that help users to distinguish between service offerings, we suggest this will be the case in the web services world too. We have advanced several criteria to judge the quality of solutions to the problems of dynamic ad-hoc interaction. We will use the Securities Lending case study to elucidate the solution to enabling ad-hoc interaction.

Status: Expected Completed Q2/2003