Personalized Mobile Web Service Discovery Khalid Elgazzar, Patrick Martin, Hossam S. Hassanein School of Computing, Queen’s University, Canada {elgazzar, martin, hossam}@cs.queensu.ca Abstract—Mobile devices with their various form factors have become the most convenient and pervasive computing platform, whether to carry out everyday business or to get online. Mobile users tend to adopt the fast food trend even in consuming online mobile services and functionalities. The Web service approach promises great flexibility in offering software functionality over the network, while maintaining interoperability between heterogeneous platforms. However, the diversity that exists in mobile devices and their platforms with variations in capabilities present unique challenges in developing services that can accommodate such diversity. Recent years have witnessed the rise of user-facing service developments that can be consumed on the go with standard interface, such as RESTful Web services. However, the discovery of such services does not match their growing popularity. In addition, existing discovery approaches lack supporting mechanisms that ensure the proper functioning of discovered services within the user context and failing to match personal preferences. This paper introduces personalized Web service discovery for mobile environments. Preliminary results show that incorporating user preferences and context significantly improves the overall precision of service discovery. Index Terms—Personal mobile services, Web services discov- ery, mobile computing, mobile devices. I. I NTRODUCTION According to latest Mobile Factbook released by PortioRe- search [1], the global mobile customer base has exceeded 6.5 billion subscribers in the beginning of 2013, which rep- resents 87% of the world’s current population, 1.5 billion of subscribers have broadband subscriptions. These numbers are candidate to rise in the coming years, especially with the growing interest in broadband connectivity. These facts highlight the significant potential market for mobile services and applications. The revolution in broadband wireless access technologies with the deployment of 4G networks promises to offer data services 3-4 times faster than the current speed, offering a differential user experience. Both the proliferation of mobile devices and advances in wireless technologies have contributed to the growing interest in mobile services, expanding the horizon for a great potential for a multitude of services and opportunities. In recent years, there have been a growing popularity of user-facing mobile services with the widespread adoption of RESTful Web services. RESTful Web services [2], which conform with the REST principals [3], have shown better performance and flexible provisioning in resource-constrained environments [4]–[6]. They are capable of communicating with both applications and users via dispatching the ap- propriate response format according to the consumer type. For example, XML or JSON-formatted responses are sent in response to requests originated from applications, while responses in HTML format are dispatched to the user’s Web browser. Mobile services make service personalization possible, where services are selected in the best interest of the user and that best fit the current situation. This is possible due to the fact that mobile devices are associated with users who have personal preferences, beside the ability to access various contextual information. However, existing discovery approaches lack robust techniques that can incorporate the user preferences and context while finding services that satisfy the user’s objective. Consequently, relevant services might not perform properly due to device constraints or result in poor user experience due to lack of accommodating user preferences. This paper leverages the use of context information and user preferences to personalize mobile service discovery and provide users with a differential experience. Our approach em- ploys four types of context information to filter out discovered services that do not match the user context and rank the rest according to their aggregate relevancy to such a context. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II highlights previous related work. Section III presents the proposed discovery approach, outlining the various context used and detailing our filtering and ranking methodology. Section IV demonstrates our experimental validation and Sec- tion V shows our preliminary performance evaluation results. Section VI concludes the paper and draws future directions. II. RELATED WORK One of the chief benefits of mobile services is the ability to exploit various context to provide personalized behaviour. In addition, the objective of incorporating context informa- tion with Web service discovery extends to ensure proper functioning. For example, device-aware service discovery [7] ensures the compatibility of the discovered/selected service with the device constraints. User preferences is another di- mension by which services can adapt to accommodate the consumer preferences. However, to date, there are no efficient models that can integrate user preferences with Web service descriptions and then be incorporated in the discovery process. A serious step towards this direction is proposed by Garc´ ıa et al. [8], enabling users to express their preferences using an interactive interface. The authors demonstrate a use-case on how to integrate such preferences with semantic Web service discovery. 2013 IEEE Ninth World Congress on Services 978-0-7695-5024-4/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SERVICES.2013.18 170 2013 IEEE Ninth World Congress on Services 978-0-7695-5024-4/13 $26.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SERVICES.2013.18 170