Integrating Mobile Devices in Web Processes

We present a software prototype for the communication between a mobile phone and a web-based process management system (WPMS). The communication between both is based on web services. The business process (in our example a booking process in the tourism domain) is controlled by the WPMS. The WPMS calls web services to achieve certain functionalities. The prototype allows starting a process by asking for some service from the phone. We are also able to use the phone as a server. This is demonstrated by storing user profile data in the phone and delivering this information to the web process if asked for by the WPMS and allowed by the phone’s owner. MANAGING USER PROFILES Today, the Internet is mainly used as an extremely large pool of knowledge. However, with Internet-based communication a number of new business models were developed in the last years. Web shops selling goods over the Internet can be open 24 hours a day and can find their customers world-wide. On one side, this large market is an opportunity for each seller but on the other side, competition is higher since the development of such a shop is cheaper than traditional shops. One possibility to be successful in this competition is to offer customers personalized services. For example, an international shop can adapt its user interface to the customer’s mother tongue. To enable personalized services, a service provider needs customizable products and moreover, he requires information about his customers. This information may be obtained by simply asking customers with web forms about their preferences, by deducing preferences from past transactions or by some intelligent reasoning about the customers’ behaviour in the web shop. A service provider may use an information system architecture including a User Profile Management System (UPMS) as in the following figure. Figure 1: Simple information system architecture for user profile management This architecture is sufficient for the service provider if the customer supplies him all required data. A customer, however, does not buy only in one web shop. The advantage of web shops for the customer is the easy comparison of products in different shops. Thus the customer fills out web forms quite regular. Several user agents such as Internet browsers already support users by storing data for certain fields of forms. We may store our name or a password to facilitate the completion of forms. This procedure is adequate if only few data is required. If, however, preferences about complex products are required, such forms are insufficient. A client agent should have reasonable knowledge about his user and may be authorized to negotiate with the service provider’s UPMS. Our application domain is tourism. Here complex holiday packages shall be configured. There may be a portal such as www.tiscover.at that recommends several services for a holiday. If the user agent supplies the service provider with data, we must consider security and privacy issues. We only want to give away data that is really required and moreover, we must secure that delivered data is not misused. These problems shall be addressed by the platform for privacy preferences (P3P) standard [5] an extension of Netscape’s open profiling standard. P3P defines an XMLbased language to exchange profile data between a client and a server. P3P proposes that web sites (the server or the UPMS) publish their policy, what they do with obtained data, in a standardized format. The user agent can then compare this policy with user’s preferences and will only submit that data that is accepted by the user. Customers in the tourism domain may use personal computers to plan their holiday, but during holiday they usually do not have access to a PC with their user profile. If they have access to the Internet, there would be the possibility to store a profile on a server. The second possibility for owners of sophisticated mobile phones is to store the profile in the phone. If the user searches for some information or wants to book an additional feature during his holiday, the phone may negotiate the required data with the service provider. Figure 2: Improved architecture with negotiation between user agent and UPMS We have developed a prototype software for a mobile phone, that stores user preferences and can exchange data with a WPMS, considering the user’s preferences and data privacy issues. In the following section we describe how processes are modelled and executed by a WPMS. Then we describe the storage and exchange of user data. In the third section we describe technical issues of the prototype and conclude with some remarks on future expectations. BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING AND EXECUTION The MOVE project (www.ec.at) aims at an integrated development environment for virtual enterprises. One of the most important functions in a virtual enterprise is the communication between partners and the customers. First step in the development process is the definition of the desired business model. The second step is the definition of business processes such as for example “booking a holiday for a customer”. Business processes may be defined hierarchically. On the lowest process level, we have technology driven processes such as “exchanging data with mobile phone”. Whereas the high level processes are very specific for a new business model, the low level processes can be reused easily by parametrizing. For our example, we must use specific data that is exchanged between process and phone. A process model may contain several activities to be performed and a control flow describing the choreography of the process. An activity may be a sub process, a web service call or some other action performed either by another program or by a human. Our main focus in the project, however, is on a web services [8] based architecture. Besides the control flow, the information flow is specified by defining data records and flow between activities. In the data view, we specify the information flow and the data which is queried from the customer. The business model and the hierarchically defined processes are modelled with ProSpec a Java-based graphic process modelling tool [6]. The modelled process can be stored as an XPDL-process. XPDL [9] is a XML-based language proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition. XPDL enables to describe the control flow in a process and can be easily extended to integrate for example also web services. OBE (Open Business Engine) [2] is a workflow management system that executes and controls processes specified in XPDL. We have extended OBE by web service functionality enabling us to execute XPDL processes. The process itself can be deployed as a web service. The WPMS is used to execute and control a booking process for a tourist. In the prototype scenario, a booking process is deployed as web service that can now be initiated by a mobile phone simply by calling the web service with appropriate parameters. USER PROFILE REPRESENTATION AND EXCHANGE We have developed a prototype for a mobile communication in the described environment [7]. This prototype is implemented with the Java version for mobile devices (J2ME). The program allows calling a web service from the phone thus starting a process controlled by our WPMS (e.g. a search for a hotel). Moreover, the prototype realizes a small web server in a mobile phone that can be called via the SOAP-interface and with that as a web service. A user can login in a usual web shop via his PC. If the service provider requires certain data it may query the phone if the number of the phone is known. If the web server needs data from the client, it sends a profile template to the client. The client software looks into its database whether the desired attributes are defined. If not, the user is asked to supply the data to the phone. If attributes are defined, the client investigates the policy of the server to decide whether the data can be transferred to the web server. This decision is based on the users preferences stored also in the database of the phone. The data exchange is based on XML-schema. The following code shows exemplary an abbreviated exchanged profile: Juergen 1 www.illegal.at String Dorn 1 www.illegal.at String ... Guideline_X123 ... The user can decide for each attribute whether it may be sent automatically if asked for. Thus a user may specify which data may be transferred automatically to a tourism portal. However, if credit card information is required the user may want to be asked again and may accept the transfer with a single key stroke on the phone. For other attributes the user may specify that they shal never be transferred to a tourism portal. Usually the user will not specify his preferences immediately with his phone’s user interface. Therefore, also a profile portal is required, where the user will specify his preferences and then load it on his phone. Such a portal may be provided by mobile phone operators. The software for the mobile phone can easily be downloaded from standard web sites or from special web portals for mobile devices.