An Agent-Based Framework for Secure and Privacy-Preserving Personalized Information Services

Providers of next-generation ubiquitous services are facing increasing competition. In order to attract and satisfy customers, these services must offer added value e.g. by delivering personalized information in a seamless and multi-modal way. Personalized services, however, bring about additional requirements related to privacy and security, which have to be addressed if the services are to become widely accepted. The ability to design, implement and deploy personalized information services in a secure, privacy-friendly and at the same time highly efficient way is becoming a key success factor for service providers. Nevertheless, current service development architectures usually fail to cover all relevant aspects of the service development process, resulting in an unnecessary development overhead on the side of the service provider. We introduce an agent-based Serviceware Framework assisting service providers in developing personalized information services, thus improving user acceptance and reducing the time-to-market of the resulting applications. We describe the utilization of different modules of the framework, which offer functionality for context-aware services at large, focusing on the module for personalization including privacy enhancing technologies. In addition, we present the Smart Event Assistant, a prototypical application for personalized, seamless and ubiquitous planning of entertainment activities, which we have implemented based on this Serviceware Framework.