A DSML for Coordinating User-Centric Communication Services

Rapid advances in electronic communication devices and technologies have resulted in a shift in the way communication applications are being developed. The emerging development strategies provide end-users with a greater ability to manipulate the underlying communication technologies by providing the appropriate level of abstraction, referred to as user-centric communication. In communication-intensive domains such as telemedicine and disaster management, the user-centric communication strategies still lack the ability to coordinate the various communication services in collaborative processes. In this paper, we present a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), Workflow Communication Modeling Language (WF-CML), that supports the rapid realization of collaborative user-centric communication applications. WF-CML is an extension of CML with communication specific abstractions of workflow concepts. To realize WF-CML models, the dynamic synthesis process in the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) prototype was extended to coordinate the negotiation and media transfer processes based on events generated during the collaboration. We also present a comparative study to show the advantage of using WF-CML over a general-purpose workflow language and execution environment.