Supporting Mobile Service Interaction through Semantic Service Description Annotation and Automatic Interface Generation

One of the current challenges in Mobile Computing is bringing services directly to mobile users, which is handicapped by two major hurdles: Phones and services do not interoperate as smoothly as they should and the delivered services have to be adapted to a wide range of different mobile client platforms. In order to address these problems we present a service framework that extends Semantic Web Service descriptions with abstract interface annotations and uses them for the automatic generation of adapted user interfaces. These interfaces support and facilitate the mobile interaction with physical objects and thus the interaction with associated Semantic Web Services. The focus of this paper lies on the service description annotations based on OWL-S. Furthermore we show how these extensions can be used for the generation of a compact and abstract interface description as the basis for the rendering of Java ME and XHTML based interfaces. In order to motivate our approach and confirm its concept, we developed two prototypes for mobile ticketing that are based on the presented system.