Discovery Pervasive Services based on their Expected Use

Pervasive services accomplish tasks that are related with common tasks in the life of the user such as paying for parking or buying a bus ticket. These services are often closely related to a specific location and to the situation of the user; and they are not characterized by a strong notion of goal that must be achieved as part of a much broader plan, but they are used to address the contingent situation. For these reasons, these services challenge the usual vision of service discovery and composition as goal directed activities. In this paper we propose a new way to look at service discovery that is centered around the activities of the user and the information that the user has available rather than the goals that a given service achieves.