WSCA-2007 Keynote Talk
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Title: Composing and Adapting Services: The Task-Centric Versus the User-Centric Approach

Abstract: Service composition and adaptation are key ideas for service-oriented applications. They 
allow for the development of software solutions that can cope with the need for rapid change and 
increasingly complex distributed environments. Service composition is traditionally understood as 
the activity of combining component services to perform a new and more complex task. The result is 
usually a new service that can be used in its turn as a component for further compositions that 
perform even more complex and higher level tasks. We call this "classical" view of service composition, 
"task-centric composition". Some application domains require however different kinds of compositions, 
where the goal is not to compose services into new services that perform a desired complex task, but 
rather to harmonize the existing services to satisfy the overall constrains and desiderata of users. 
While exploiting these services requires composing and integrating them together, the focus is on 
the harmonization and combined usage of the services, rather than on a fixed composition. We call 
this new view on service composition, "user-centric composition". In this talk, I will discuss 
different approaches to composition and adaptation of services according to the task-centric 
as well as the user-centric approach. 


Speaker: Dr. Paolo Traverso


Speaker's Bio: Paolo Traverso is director of research at IRST, where he leads
a division working on software and services, knowledge management, and
embedded systems. He joined IRST in 1989, after working for four years in the
advanced technology group of a company for management information consulting.
From 1995 to 1999, he led the IRST lab working on software development and
verification. He contributed to research in automated planning with a novel
technique called "planning as model checking", which is now the basis for his
work on supporting the automated composition and run-time monitoring of
service oriented applications. He is a member of the Executive Council of the
International Conference on Automated Planning (ICAPS) - he was program chair
of ICAPS in 2002 - and a member of the Steering Committee of the International
Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC) - he was General and Program
Chair of ICSOC in 2004 and 2005. In 2005, he was nominated ECCAI fellow.