Developing a Meta-model to Support End-User Service Composition

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 and its related technologies, more and more end-users start to participate in the development of World Wide Web. Yet, not enough attention from both academics and industries has been paid to allowing them to compose services to assist their daily work. This is mainly due to the lack of a high-level abstraction that defines what concepts, functions, and system components a platform should equip to support end-user service composition. This paper first defines the crucial requirements of end-user friendly service composition tools, and then presents End-User Service Composition Model, a platform-independent meta-model that serves as a basis for the design and development of such an end-user friendly platform based on these requirements. Finally, the paper applies this meta-model to four existing end-user service composition platforms to see if they meet these requirements.