A digital service ecosystem enables value creation and the co-development of services in a value network under a common ecosystem regulation. The ecosystem members are able to focus on their core competences and can strengthen their forces by co-operating; yet remaining able to act independently. However, due to regulated environment, the ecosystem elements—i.e. ecosystem members, capabilities, infrastructure and the existing ecosystem assets—have an influence on digital service engineering, especially in the service requirements engineering phase. The main contribution of this paper is to describe how to specify the requirements of digital services in a digital service ecosystem. To this aim, this paper introduces the basic definitions and elements of the digital service ecosystem, and a scenario-based service requirement engineering (RE) method for the digital service ecosystem. A practical example is given to illustrate the use of the RE method. The collected feedback from the RE method users highlights the user experiences on the advantages and limitations of the proposed method.

With rapid advances in the enabling technologies for pervasive computing and with the requirements for communication systems autonomy, ontology-based semantic approaches as applied to contextual application scenarios have recently received a great deal of attention from the research community. However, service modelling using semantic knowledge sources and the available service semantic description languages can be a time and effort consuming process, which thus leads to the poor acceptance of semantic technologies. The semantic support environment presented in this research addresses this shortcoming providing a more illustrative and understandable way to view ontology instances associated with complex contextual information. It enables semantic modelling and the interactive simulation of physical real-world contextual environments of interest (i.e. devices, services, functional capabilities of service, contexts). It provides support for the design of applications or middleware level services.

The Amigo project aims to develop a networked home system enabling the ambient intelligence / pervasive computing vision by effectively integrating devices and their hosted services in today’s home. The Amigo system architecture poses limited technology-specific restrictions, supporting interoperability among heterogeneous services.

Wireless services are software-based services that exploit distribution infrastructure embedded in our everyday life as various communication and computing technologies. Service architecture defines concepts and principles to develop and maintain services to obtain the quality issues with minimum cost and faster time-to-market. In order to boost the development of wireless services, more effective means of using existing architectural know-how and artifacts are required. Our contribution is the architectural knowledge base that introduces three cornerstones: the service taxonomy, reference service architecture, and basic services that alt together provide an efficient means of creating added value with wireless services. The service taxonomy assists in identifying the required functional and quality properties of services and the constraints of the underlying technology platforms. The reference architecture realizes the required properties, based on a selected set of architectural styles and patterns, and provides a skeleton upon which a new end-user service can be developed faster and more easily by using partially ready-made solutions, and furthermore, to keep the architectural knowledge base evolving at the same time. The architectural knowledge base has been validated in several research projects with industrial companies.