Coordinating Adaptations in Open Service Architectures
Markus Bylund · 1999
An Open Service Architecture (OSA) is a software structure that makes an open set of information services available to an open set of users. The World Wide Web constitutes the most outstanding example of an OSA as of today. An important feature of an OSA is personalization, i.e. adapting the user interface, functionality, and information of services to its users. However, designers of such a feature are facing many problems, perhaps the biggest one being coordination. If services fail to coordinate how they adapt to users, chances are that the whole point of performing the adaptation, i.e. helping the user, is lost. In this thesis, I lay out a framework for describing and reasoning about adaptive systems in Open Service Architectures, with a special emphasis on coordination. This framework is mainly meant for analysis and design, but some of the ideas presented are also suitable as metaphors for implementations. An implementation of an adaptive system that was designed using this fram...