An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Considering Quality of a Service in an Intentional Approach

International audienceThe success of service-based applications is based on service technologies such as Web services. Nevertheless, the benefits of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) remain mainly at the software level, since business people are often unable to fully exploit its benefits due to their unfamiliarity with such software level technology. The intentional Service-Oriented Architecture (iSOA) suggests a move from the function-driven SOA to intention-driven SOA in order to provide service description understandable by business practitioners. However, such transposition from business to implementation level should also consider Quality of Service (QoS) aspects. In this paper, we propose modeling the Quality of intentional Service (QoiS) by introducing the quality goals and their qualitative and quantitative evaluation. We also propose populating the intentional service registry of the iSOA architecture with the QoiS description

Financial Information Mediation: A Case Study of Standards Integration for Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment Using the COIN Mediation Technology

Each player in the financial industry, each bank, stock exchange, government agency, or insurance company operates its own financial information system or systems. By its very nature, financial information, like the money that it represents, changes hands. Therefore the interoperation of financial information systems is the cornerstone of the financial services they support. E-services frameworks such as web services are an unprecedented opportunity for the flexible interoperation of financial systems. Naturally the critical economic role and the complexity of financial information led to the development of various standards. Yet standards alone are not the panacea: different groups of players use different standards or different interpretations of the same standard. We believe that the solution lies in the convergence of flexible E-services such as web-services and semantically rich meta-data as promised by the semantic Web; then a mediation architecture can be used for the documentation, identification, and resolution of semantic conflicts arising from the interoperation of heterogeneous financial services. In this paper we illustrate the nature of the problem in the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) industry and the viability of the solution we propose. We describe and analyze the integration of services using four different formats: the IFX, OFX and SWIFT standards, and an example proprietary format. To accomplish this integration we use the COntext INterchange (COIN) framework. The COIN architecture leverages a model of sources and receivers’ contexts in reference to a rich domain model or ontology for the description and resolution of semantic heterogeneity.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Appraisal of Cashless Policy on the Nigerian Financial System

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been active in the inauguration of policies and schemes to foster the implementation of the cashless policy in Nigeria. However the current transition to cashless economy raises a lot of concerns with no substantial evidence yet to justify its implementation. This study was carried out in order to appraise the implementation of the cashless policy since its introduction into the Nigerian financial system in 2012 and also to examine the persistent challenges facing its implementation. In view of the above stated objective, primary data were collected with the aid of the questionnaire, which was randomly administered to 120 respondents ranging from First Bank, Zenith Bank and United Bank for Africa. The banks were selected based on their total assets and the information collected covered the activities of the CBN and that of these banks towards implementation of the cashless policy from 2012 till date.The data collected were presented and analyzed with the aid of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) using descriptive statistics and one-sample t-test. The results led to the conclusion that despite the need to operate cashless transactions dominating the modern Nigerian economy, the cashless policy will have the desired impact only if a lot is done to ensure the implementation of an effective cashless system