As discussed earlier, our concept of a Human Assisted Service Environment (HASE) encompasses the handling of the interaction between the human and the software on mobile devices. Mobile devices impose a set of constraints that need to be taken into account, like connectivity, screen size of the device, input capabilities or user interface limitations. For example, a SOAP messages like:

 

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<soap:Envelope
xmlns:soap=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope”
soap:encodingStyle=”http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-encoding”>

<soap:Body xmlns:m=”http://www.example.org/stock”>
<m:GetStockPrice>
<m:StockName>IBM</m:StockName>
</m:GetStockPrice>
</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

must be transformed (e.g., with XSLT) to remove the meta information, before presenting it to the human. Thus, the handling of SOAP requests requires the implementation of a dedicated client that is able to parse the incoming requests and – based on the input – generate a user interface to present the request. The generation of arbitrary interfaces is difficult; however, it is possible to accept only a certain type of SOAP requests for which the user interface is present.
By utilizing a platform like Twitter, we circumvent these types of limitations: we simply utilize Tweets to represent Service requests that are written in Tweetflows, a human-readable domain-specific language to interact with Services, both human- and software-provided. Especially the the human readability of Tweetflow commands (see our Amazon Mechanical Turk Experiment) has the benefit of not needing an additional extra layer of transforming Service requests into human-readable Service requests. A Tweetflow command that is received on a mobile device as Tweet only requires a Twitter client to interact with.

your ikangai science team

Tags: GUI Considerations, Tweetflows, Twitter for Team Collaboration