Exercise 15

1. Location based service

"A location-based service (LBS) is a software application for a IP-capable mobile device that requires knowledge about where the mobile device is located. Location-based services can be query-based and provide the end user with useful information such as "Where is the nearest ATM?" or they can be push-based and deliver coupons or other marketing information to customers who are in a specific geographical area.[...]An LBS requires five basic components: the service provider's software application, a mobile network to transmit data and requests for service, a content provider to supply the end user with geo-specific information, a positioning component (see GPS) and the end user's mobile device." http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci532097,00.html

LBS can be used to find(nearest the users current location):

• Places, including restaurants, movie theaters, mechanics
• People, doctors, co-workers, friends
• Proximity based payment, EZ pass, bus tickets

2. Open Mobile Alliance Initiative

"The Open Mobile Alliance Ltd. has been established by the consolidation of the WAP Forum and the Open Mobile Architecture Initiative. The new Open Mobile Alliance is a group of companies and organizations, with a commitment to a shared set of principles, who have come together to drive the growth of the mobile industry. It intends to grow the market for the entire industry by removing barriers to interoperability and supporting a seamless and easy-to-use mobile experience for end users.

The mission of the Open Mobile Alliance is to grow the market for the entire mobile industry by removing the barriers to global user adoption and by ensuring seamless application interoperability while allowing businesses to compete through innovation and differentiation.

The Open Mobile Alliance encourages competition through innovation and differentiation, while ensuring the interoperability of mobile service through the entire value chain. The supporters of the Open Mobile Alliance recognize the significant industry benefits of creating a standards organization that will included all elements of the wireless value chain, and contribute to timely and efficient introduction of services and applications to the market." http://www.palowireless.com/wap/oma.asp

3. Mobile web services framework

The main components of the mobile web services framework as stated by IEEE Distributed Systems Online.

"Figure 1 shows our proposed framework’s architecture. We built it on the standard Web service architecture’s three pillars—a service provider, requestor, and registry—but we also introduced three new components: a service broker, a workflow engine, and a mobile Web service agent.

Figure 1. Our proposed framework’s architecture. The framework preserves the three roles in the standard Web service architecture, but also introduces three new components.

The new architecture complies with wireless portal networks and attempts to overcome both the processing overhead on mobile devices and the data load on wireless links with limited bandwidth.

Service broker

The service broker augments data stored on the UDDI registry with nonfunctional attributes such as service-area location, service time, and accessible network types. Each provider that implements a new service supplies this information; for this reason, we defined a service broker service ontology similar to one described elsewhere.⁹ Figure 2 shows this ontology’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram.

Figure 2. UML class diagram for the service broker service ontology. The service broker provides Web services for mobile clients. By invoking these Web services, mobile clients can specify their domain or service-class-specific preferences and search all available services.

The service broker service ontology specifies a domain (such as food, rental, or entertainment) and a set of synonyms for flexible search. The rental domain, for example, includes “rent” and “lease” as synonyms as well as a set of service classes to define properties. Each service that belongs to a service class must have a unique name.

A service class is further specified by its attributes, which are service-class specific and can include URIs. These attributes also hold nonfunctional attributes, which the mobile agent uses to select available services that match user preferences and context. In the food domain, for example, the “pizza” class might have attributes such as minimum delivery time and minimum delivery amount.

Workflow engine

The workflow engine uses standard orchestration languages to execute any processes the service providers give as workflows. While executing a workflow, the engine communicates with Web service providers and invokes related services. All messaging between the engine and the provider is via standard SOAP messaging. Having several workflow engines on the network helps avoid a single point of failure.

Mobile Web service agents

A mobile Web service agent acts as a gateway to Web services for mobile clients and handles all communication between mobile clients and the service broker or workflow engine.

The mobile Web service agent is located inside the mobile network. It receives the input parameters required for service execution from the mobile device and returns the executed service. The agent also selects services according to user preferences and context information such as location, air-link capacity, or access-network type." http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline/menuitem.9ed3d9924aeb0dcd82ccc6716bbe36ec/index.jsp?&pName=dso_level1&path=dsonline/2006/06&file=w3bener.xml&xsl=article.xsl&