| Abstract: | We investigate ambient services, which we define as services that are related to the surrounding physical environment of the user, are locally useful and can be considered a form of location-based services. We introduce the notion of service domain which refers to the geographical area of relevance and utility for ambient services. We also consider a stereotypical case where a user might be within multiple service domains at the same time (when the service domains containing the user overlap) and so, can utilize a collection of services comprising services selected from each of the service domains containing the user. A language of operators is given for defining such a collection of services in terms of constituent services from the overlapping service-domains. Moreover, we describe and evaluate a prototype system that shows how to compute the services for a user in multiple service domains. The result is a framework for reasoning about ambient services for filtering or proactively suggesting mobile services based on geographical boundaries.Seng Wai Loke is a Faculty of Information Technology Research Fellow at Monash University. He is author and co-author of more than 90 research papers published in journals, books, conferences, and workshops. His research interests are intelligent and mobile agents, service-oriented computing, and pervasive computing including device ecologies, context-aware systems, mobile services, and ubiquitous e-commerce. He has been on the program committee of more than ten conferences and workshops in the area of mobile computing and agents.Shonali Krishnaswamy received a PhD in Computer Science from Monash University (Australia) in 2003. She currently holds the position of a Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University. Her research interests include Service Oriented Systems, Software Agents and Distributed/Ubiquitous Data Mining. She is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Societies.Thin Thin Naing has completed her Masters by Information Technology (MIT by Minor Thesis) from the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include Mobile Services, Location-based Services and Ambient services.This revised version was published online in August 2005 with a corrected cover date. |
