Real-world-oriented service platform based on the task model

Context-aware services are designed to assist users in the real world, but they support only a very limited number of user activities. This article presents a new service platform that can select appropriate services for a wide variety of real-world user activities. The importance of task-awareness for service selection is first emphasized. To obtain task-awareness, a new task model that models comprehensive user activities in the real world is proposed. It enables precise association between user activities and services that assist in performing the activities. This article then presents a new service-selection schema based on the task model. An architecture for building the schema over a network and mobile terminals is discussed, and research on technologies for achieving the architecture is briefly described; these technologies include a tool for populating a task model database, an algorithm for acquiring spatial and temporal contexts to be used as restrictions on service selection, and a push-control mechanism for presenting the results of service selection to users in a context-aware manner. The article concludes with a brief summary and some remarks about potential applications of the proposed platform and its components