Context-Sensitive Service Discovery for Mobile Commerce Applications

Over the last few years the number of services for mobile devices that are connected to the internet via UMTS or wireless 802.11 hotspots has grown tremendously. However, only a small proportion of these applications or services, has been successfully adopted and none has yet turned out to be the hoped-for killer application. We believe that context-sensitive service discovery is the key success factor for mobile applications and could have the same impact and level of success as search engines on desktop computers. Keyword-based searches using typical search engines or portals for browsing services with a mobile device often do not provide satisfying results within a reasonable period of time and they are cumbersome to use because of the restricted and limited input capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper we present a hybrid service discovery approach that uses context information to reduce human device interaction and delivers precise, personalized search results for service requests in a changing environment.