Guided interaction: A language and
method for incremental revelation of
service interfaces for ad hoc interaction
Phillipa Oaks and Arthur ter Hofstede
Abstract
At present, most of the interest in web services is focussed on
pre-planned B2B interaction. Clients interact with services using
advance
knowledge of the the data and sequence requirements of the service and
pre-programmed calls to their interfaces. This type of interaction
cannot
be used for ad hoc interaction between services and their clients such
as mobile devices moving in and around rich dynamic environments
because they may not have the necessary knowledge in advance. For
unplanned ad hoc interaction an interaction mechanism is needed that
does not require clients to have advance knowledge of programmatic
service interfaces and interaction sequences. The mechanism must ensure
clients with different resources and diverse competencies can
successfully interact with newly discovered services by providing
assistance such as disambiguation of terminology, alternative types of
inputs, and context sensitive error reporting when necessary.
This paper proposes a service interaction mechanism called guided
interaction. Guided interaction is designed to enable clients without
prior knowledge of programmatic interfaces to be assisted to a
successful outcome. The mechanism is grounded in core computing
primitives and based on a dialogue model. Guided interaction has two
parts, the first part is a language for the exchange of information
between services and their clients. The second part is a language for
services to create interaction plans that allow them to gather the data
they require from clients in a flexible way with the provision of
assistance when necessary. An inter preter uses the plan to generate
and interpret messages in the exchange language and to manage the path
of the dialogue.