# SCoPE: Service Composition and Personalization Environment
## 3 Background and Literature Review
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{142.3 pt} p{142.3 pt}} \hline \hline
**Business Services** & **Reference** \\ \hline “A change in the condition of a person, or a good belonging to some economic entity, brought about as the result of the activity of some other economic entity, with the approval of the first person or economic entity”. & [19] \\ \hline “Such a kind of specialized services and business operations mainly concerned with providing professional and specialized support for the business processes of other organizations, i.e., the clients”. & [20] \\ \hline “A business activity, part of organization’s business model, resulting in intangible outcomes or benefits”. & [21] \\ \hline “A specific set of actions that are performed by an organization”. & [17] \\ \hline “Are present at a time T and location L if, at time T, the agent is explicitly committed to guaranteeing the execution of some type of action at location L, on the occurrence of a certain triggering event, in the interest of another agent and upon prior agreement, in a certain way”. & [22] \\ \hline “Traditional services that feature higher inclusions of ICT and human capital adopt new techniques, new innovative business models, and new resource configurations patterns, thereby producing more added-value”. & [18] \\ \hline (In the elderly care domain) “Are equivalent to what is usually called care and assistance service: services provided to the end users which involve a number of software services and human intervention”. & [23] \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Business Service Descriptions. **Collaborative Networks**: a Collaborative Network (CN) is an \"alliance constituted of a variety of entities (e.g., organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals, but that collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals, and whose interactions are supported by a computer network\" [14]. Various authors have shown that membership in a collaborative environment offers a number of advantages to the engaged organizations, including \"survivability in a context of market turbulence, acquisition of a larger apparent dimension, access to new or wider markets and new knowledge, sharing risks and resources, joining of complementary skills, reaching high level of agility, and better achieving common goals\" [30; 31; 32]. As a result, many examples of collaborative networks can be found in society, including supply chains, virtual teams, virtual organizations and virtual enterprises, professional virtual communities, industry clusters, business ecosystems, collaborative virtual laboratories, etc. Examples of business areas that have benefited from the adoption of the collaborative networks paradigm include the classical supply chain in automotive industry [33; 34; 35], the agribusiness sector [36; 37; 38], the transport sector [39], the smart grid sector [27; 40], water management [41; 42], biodiversity data providers [43], ICT and aging [44; 45], etc. More specifically, for the elderly care domain examples can extend to home safety and care, localization and mobility assistance, health monitoring, rehabilitation and disabilities compensation, caring and intervention on medication or nutrition, learning support systems, social and entertainment services, adjusted working spaces, intergenerational relations, assisted living facilities (e.g., with sensors, smart home appliances, and service robotics), senior intelligent villages, etc. [11]. A growing number of virtual communities or social networks specifically for seniors can already be found on the Internet. Some examples are shown in Table 2, this sample includes 24 social networks offering services exclusively for seniors, ranging from leisure, dating, and games, to health and sports. Some of these cases go beyond a simple social network and present some characteristics of a virtual professional community, aiming at supporting active aging.