Telco meets the web: Programming shared-experience services

With current technology, it is relatively easy to create a new web service or a mashup combining several Web services. On the other hand, it is considerably more difficult to build services that combine telecommunications and Web aspects. Our thesis is that this is primarily due to the lack of a simple, yet expressive model for representing telco services. This paper presents a model, called the session data type (SDT), for the particular class of shared-experience services. The SDT model results in a considerable simplification of the design and the implementation of “telco+web” mashups. This paper provides several examples of such mashups and describes a prototype implementation.