Towards policy driven context aware differentiated services design and development

In the dynamic e-business environment, it is desirable for a service with different interfaces to meet the requirements of different users. Within the context of the currently available technologies, it is usual to make several unrelated services available, each of which supports a specific interaction path. However, as the number of users increases, such design makes it difficult to maintain the large number of services. In this paper an alternative service design method is proposed, 'service differentiation', which allows a single service to be differentiated with interface variation to meet the different interaction requirements. Inspired by the concept of abstraction and polymorphism in object oriented computing, service differentiation allows an 'abstract business process' class to be configured by policy, hence multiple business processes can be derived to meet different user interaction requirements.