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A social network for supporting end users in the composition of services: definition and proof of concept

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Abstract

Nowadays, end users are surrounded by plenty of services that are somehow supporting their daily routines and activities. Involving end users into the process of service creation can allow end users to benefit from a cheaper, faster, and better service provisioning. Even though we can already find tools that face this challenge, they consider end users as isolate individuals. In this paper, we investigate how social networks can be used to improve the composition of services by end users. To do so, we propose a graph-based definition of a social structure, and analyse how social connections can be exploited to both facilitate end users to discover services through browsing these connections, and recommend services to end users during the composition activity. As proof of concept, we implement and evaluate the proposed social network in the context of EUCalipTool, a mobile end-user environment for composing services.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been developed with the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the Project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.

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Correspondence to Pedro Valderas.

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Valderas, P., Torres, V. & Pelechano, V. A social network for supporting end users in the composition of services: definition and proof of concept. Computing 102, 1909–1940 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-020-00796-8

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