Individual service provisioning

Sammanfattning: Computer usage is once again going through changes. Leaving behind the experiences of mainframes with terminal access and personal computers with graphical user interfaces, we are now headed for handheld devices and ubiquitous computing; we are facing the prospect of interacting with electronic services. These network-enabled functional components provide benefit to users regardless of their whereabouts, access method, or access device. The market place is also changing, from suppliers of monolithic oÆ-the-shelf applications, to open source and collaboratively developed specialized services. It is within this new arena of computing that we describe Individual Service Provisioning, a design and implementation that enables end users to create and provision their own services. Individual Service Provisioning consists of three components: a personal service environment, in which users can access and manage their services; ServiceDesigner, a tool with which to create new services; and the provisioning system, which turns end users into service providers.