Context

NESSI identifies the adoption of Service Oriented Business Models as a fundamental shift that is necessary to change the European economy into “the world's most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based society”. This paradigm shift manifests itself by the “evolution of business models from the sale of products to the provision of electronic services”, where services are seen as utilities that can be used but that are not owned by users. Ultimately, this shift will mean transforming the Internet to service the daily life of citizens, businesses and organizations.

Experience shows that acceptance of many tools and systems depends on how interaction with the final user is resolved. In the same way, the success of the new paradigm shift will depend very much on how user/service interactions are carried out, meaning the capability to:

• adapt and assist user/service interaction depending on the user context (profile, preferences, social network it belongs to) and the delivery context (device used for access, geographical and time location, connection bandwidth)
• enable users to share their knowledge and setup their own “working/life space” (adaptation layer) which acts as the point through which interaction with available services will be managed

Development of technologies that leverage these capabilities is the challenge addressed by the proposed Working Group.

Mission

The User/Service Interaction WG is focused on leveraging existing research in human-to-computer interaction to bring a new dimension to service-oriented paradigms. It will cover research on the following areas.

• Advanced user interaction with services: definition of suitable user representation models combined with semantic descriptions of business domains, contexts and processes based on knowledge models;
• Advanced declarative abstract user interface definition languages and tools enabling user interface development by composition and configuration as well as the annotation of knowledge and the corresponding runtime environments to support multimodal/multidevice interaction with services.
• Definition and composition of user interfaces by human end users: Methods and tools to (1) allow the end-user to set-up their own personalised user interfaces by composing interface building blocks according to the device; (2) enhance personalized user interfaces in a collaborative manner or based on suggestions made by automatic agents.
• Human computer-mediated interaction and collaboration: investigate, demonstrate and assess the potential of computer-mediation (or agent-mediated) techniques to alleviate, for example, cognitive workloads or sustain work team effectiveness. The focus is on human-agent collaborative interaction modelling and how this could be first automated or semi-automated and second on how this automation could be leveraged from several perspectives (interaction, visualisation, decision, …) according to various contexts. An important aspect of the research will be into how knowledge can be propagated and shared amongst users.