A Vocabulary for Web-scale Service Trading

Carlos Pedrinaci, KMi - The Open University!Jorge Cardoso, University of Coimbra!Torsten Leidig, SAP

– Christian Grönroos

“Services are [economic] activities of an intangible nature […] which are provided as solutions to

customer problems”

Services dominate the economic activity of developed countries

Services

- Finding!- Comparing!- Bundling!- Trading !- Consuming

… are largely manual activities that in the best case only take place within silos

What offerings are available for me if I want

- Broadband!- Landline !- Mobile phone!- Movies on demand

What are their characteristics?!Which one(s) is(are) best for me?

Describing Services❖ Most earlier work concerned

with technical concerns only: WSDL, OWL-S, etc!

❖ Business centric approaches:!

❖ Focussed on products !

❖ Tackled subsets of the domain!

❖ Failed to support sharing and processing service descriptions over the Web

USDL❖ Most comprehensive

specification for service description!

❖ Led by SAP!

❖ Modelled in eCore!

❖ 9 modules with +125 classes!

❖ Failed to gain adoption due to complexity, difficulties for sharing and extending the model

Linked USDL❖ A new vocabulary informed by USDL!

❖ Open!

❖ Support the engagement of any business entity across domains may it be for trading, brokering, bundling …!

❖ Web-based!

❖ Highly interoperable solution on a world-wide scale!

❖ Promote take up!

❖ Simplicity of adoption will drive take up

Design Principles❖ Linked Data!

❖ Uniform representation, communication!

❖ Global identifiers!

❖ Interlinking (services, business entities, interfaces)!

❖ Semantics!

❖ Support automated reasoning but retain simplicity!

❖ Extensions!

❖ Reuse

Methodology

❖ Requirements Analysis!

❖ Identification of main topics and concepts to cover!

❖ Search for reusable and popular vocabularies!

❖ Reuse and modelling!

❖ Evaluation

Service Dimensions

❖ Functionality!

❖ Agents and Networks!

❖ Service Relationships!

❖ Operational and Delivery!

❖ Consumption

➡ What it does and provides!

➡ Entities involved!

➡ Bundles, enhancements!

➡ Availability, legal issues!

➡ Communication channels

Vocabulary and Data Reuse

Coverage

Supporting Tools

In use…

Ongoing and Future Work

❖ Pricing Module (coming soon)!

❖ Support for dynamic pricing models!

❖ Agreements Module (coming soon)!

❖ Support for capturing and analysing agreements and conditions behind service offerings!

❖ Tooling for automated bundling and comparison of cross service provider offerings

Thanks for your attention

More information at:!http://www.linked-usdl.org!

!Vocabularies tools and libraries available at:!

https://github.com/linked-usdl