City Guide: Service Composition in an Urban Environment

Abstract

The aim of this thesis has been to develop and validate the user interface of a service composition tool for creating mobile tourist services in a city environment. The project has been conducted in cooperation with SINTEF and the Norwegian research project UbiCompForAll. As part of this thesis, a number of scenarios were created initially, showing what kind of functionalities accessed using mobile devices might be useful for tourists in the city. Based on these scenarios, the graphical user interface of a composition service tool was created and then assessed through the involvement of several users using a paper prototyping approach. The results from the paper prototyping assessment showed that the proposed interface is generally easy to understand and use, although there were a number of improvements necessary in the areas of information abstraction, module naming and letting users be able to see the final product of the composition. In addition, as part of the assessment of the proposed interface, the realizability of the services specified using this interface was evaluated. An architecture for the service derived from the specification developed by the user was defined. This enabled us to check that all the information necessary for creating the composed services can be provided when using the proposed user interface.