# SCoPE: Service Composition and Personalization Environment
## 4 Elderly Care Ecosystem and Related Definitions  
An Elderly Care Ecosystem (ECE) can be considered a particular case of a collaborative business ecosystem, specially designed to support the management of service providers, services, and customers (elderly people and relatives). The main idea of ECE is to have an environment to facilitate the personalization, composition, and evolution of care services. To construct the ECE framework, a number of information elements is necessary. This information fundamentally describes available providers and services in the ECE, the customers, and the care needs/goals taxonomically organized. In [10], we describe a detailed conceptual model for the ECE. In the following, we present the fundamental definitions of this model that are used during the description of Scope method (see Section 6):  
Definition 1: Elderly Care Ecosystem--represents the system that supports the creation, management, and analysis of virtual organizations to attend customer's needs. In other words, a kind of breeding environment for virtual organizations in elderly care. An ECE is composed of two subsystems, defined as:  
\[\text{ECE}=\text{$<$}\,\text{EC}_{IS},\text{EC}_{EV}> \tag{1}\]  
where EC\({}_{IS}\) is the information subsystem that maintains the ECE objects and EC\({}_{EV}\) is the evolution subsystem that identifies opportunities for service personalization and evolution and ranks potential services and service providers to attend the new opportunities. An EC\({}_{IS}\) is described as:  
\[\text{EC}_{IS}=\text{$<$}\,VO,\text{$SP$},\text{SE},\text{CU},\text{RQ},\text{ TX}> \tag{2}\]  
where VO is a set of virtual organizations existing in the ECE, SP represents the service providers available in the ECE, SE is the set of services offered in the ECE, CU the set of customers, RQ the set of customer's requests, and TX is the taxonomy of services and care needs, which is unique for the ECE, but at the same time dynamic. We describe the elements of an EC\({}_{IS}\) in the following. Definition 2: Virtual organization (VO)--represents an alliance of independent organizations sharing resources and skills that collaborate to achieve a common goal [61; 62; 63]. It represents a temporary consortium of organizations that come together to deliver an integrated care service. We define a particular VO as:  
\[\text{VO}=\text{$<$}\,SP_{\text{VO}},\text{$SE_{\text{VO}}$},\text{$cu_{\text {VO}}$},\text{RQ}_{\text{VO}}> \tag{3}\]  
where \(SP_{\text{VO}}\subset SP\) is a set of service providers, \(SE_{\text{VO}}\) is a set of services provided by \(SP_{\text{VO}}\), \(cu_{\text{VO}}\subset\text{CU}\) represents a set of customers, and \(\text{RQ}_{\text{VO}}\) the customer's requests. Definition 3: Service providers (SP)--represents a set of organizations (physical or virtual) that provide care services. Therefore, the relation SP-r-SE: \(SP_{\text{VO}}\to SE_{\text{VO}}\) holds. A service provider is characterized by one or more areas of actuation AR and its trustworthiness rating tr. Thus, a service provider \(sp\in SP_{\text{VO}}\) is defined as:  
\[sp=\text{$<$}\,AR_{sp},\text{tr}> \tag{4}\]_where \(AR_{sp}\subset AR\) represents a set of actuation areas, and \(tr:[1..5]\) is the trustworthiness of the service provider. We assume \(AR=\{independent\ living,cuptation,health,recreation\}\) based on the four life settings described by [PERSON], [PERSON] [11]. Trustworthiness is given by a combination of the customers rating and the reliability level calculated by the ECE framework management. The scale assumes one as the lowest and five as the highest level of trustworthiness._  
**Definition 4**. : _Services (SE)--represent the set of services offered in ECE. Each service represents a business value provided to a customer by a service provider [17]. A service can be either atomic or integrated (combining several other services).