Service Provisioning Support for Non-technical Service Clients

Recently paradigms such as Service-Oriented and Pervasive Computing are merging in scenarios where users are surrounded by a plethora of computing devices and available services. Dealing with this potentially large number of devices and services can become overwhelming to users without appropriate software support. Moreover, in the case of non-technical users, an additional difficulty is to express service requests using technical concepts such as data types, XML documents, etc. In this paper we present the architectural design of a software platform aiming at supporting the service provisioning for non-technical users. The platform also makes use of the surrounding computing devices to gather contextual information that helps in the tasks of service discovery, selection and composition.