Ubiquitous service composition for all users

In the near future, intelligent objects and devices will become part of the environment where people live, providing information and offering services that can assist them in everyday life. In such settings, it is desirable that services offered to the us ers are meaningful (i.e. satisfy their tasks and needs). Intelligent environments should support the composition of partial information or service behaviours into comprehensive services that can achieve the user goals. Such composition should take place d ynamically as new service opportunities arise, such as when new devices appear or as users enter new environments. Service discovery and composition should not require expert knowledge, but be manageable for ordinary users. The idea of UbiCompForAll is a bout providing support to end users so they can easily compose service behaviours in ubiquitous service environments, and thereby achieve their service goals. As autonomy is an important characteristic of components in ubiquitous environments, UbiCompForA ll will develop solutions suited for the composition of collaborative service behaviours. Collaborative services entail a collaboration among several active objects, and may be seen as a generalization of contemporary SOA that focuses on client-server int eractions, allowing for a wider class of services. UbiCompForAll will both provide graphical composition tools targeted the end users and middleware support for transparent composition. UbiCompForAll has a core of highly committed partners with compleme ntary technical competencies to tackle the necessary research tasks, and each has strategic interests in the research and in the results.