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

On Business Services Representation – The 3 x 3 x 3 Approach

The increasing popularity and influence of service-oriented computing give rise to the need of representational and methodological supports for the development and management of business services. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for representing Web services. Unfortunately, there has not been much work in modeling high-level services from a business perspective. Modeling business services should arguably capture their inherent features, along with many other representational artifacts. We propose a novel approach for business services representation featuring a three-dimensional representational space of which dimensions stand for the service consumer, service provider and service context. We also discuss how the proposed representation approach provides methodological supports to the area of service orientation. Finally, we present in-progress work on the application of our approach

The Determinants of Open Source Quality: An Empirical Investigation

Open source (OS) licenses differ in the conditions under which licensors and OS contributors are allowed to modify and redistribute the source code. While recent research has explored the determinants of license choice, we know little about the impact of license choice on project success. In this paper, we measure success by the speed with which programming bugs are fixed. Using data obtained from SourceForge.net, a free service that hosts OS projects, we test whether the license chosen by project leaders influences bug resolution rates. In initial regressions, we find a strong correlation between the hazard of bug resolution and the use of highly restrictive licenses. However, license choices are likely to be endogenous. We instrument license choice using (i) the human language in which contributors operate and (ii) the license choice of the project leaders for a previous project. We then find weak evidence that restrictive licenses adversely affect project success.open source software, property rights, copy-left

An Analysis of Bundle Pricing in Horizontal and Vertical Markets: The Case of the U.S. Cottonseed Market

In this paper, we investigate substitution/complementarity relationships among products sold with different bundled characteristics and under different vertical arrangements. Our conceptual model demonstrates the interactive price impacts emanating from product differentiation, market concentration and market size. The model is applied to the U.S. cottonseed market using transaction level data from 2002 to 2007. This market has been impacted structurally in numerous ways due to the advances and the rapid adoption of seeds with differing bundles of biotechnology traits and vertical penetration emanating from the biotechnology seed industry. Several interesting findings are reported. The econometric investigation finds evidence of sub-additive pricing in the bundling of patented biotech traits. Vertical organization is found to affect pricing and the exercise of market power. While higher market concentration is associated with higher prices, there is also evidence of cross-product complementarity effects that lead to lower prices. Simulation methods are developed to measure the net price effects. These simulations are applicable for use in pre-merger analysis of industries producing differentiated products and exhibiting similar market complexities.

Assessment of SOA Potentials in B2B Networks – Concept and Application to German Used Car Distribution Networks

Although service-oriented architecture (SOA) is supposed to increase external integration capabilities, it is mostly applied within company boundaries. How companies should apply SOA to improve their inter-organizational relationships is not, as yet, well understood. Although there are several examples of service-oriented concepts in the B2B context, there has been little research in which the different facets of SOA application are analyzed in inter-organizational relationships and B2B networks. This research aims at filling this gap. First, it identifies SOA potentials from literature and classifies them into a conceptual model for B2B networks. Second, it applies the conceptual model to used car distribution as a real-world scenario. This real-world example demonstrates that a SOA business case is highly situational and that key SOA capabilities need to be mapped to the specific industry context

Automation of Invoice Process

This project has been carried out to automate the Billing Invoice Process fee calculation in an organization which provides software solutions to the Medical Device industry and integrated tele-health services. This Billing Invoice Application is built to create a Sale agreement for a new customer, Fee calculation and generate the Invoice for a customer. This project provides the functionality to calculate the fee before generating the Invoice of a customer. This system provides the functionality to manage monthly service fee and ASP fee, Supply fee, Shipping fee, Refurbishing fee, Miscellaneous Parts fee and also manages Bundle fee depends on the devices ordered by a customer. It also manages the fee calculation in an individual patient level. The current process of dealing with the fee calculation should be replaced in a manner such that only a new customer’s sale agreement should be set up manually as per the customer’s contract and moving forward from that point, all the actions like bundling the devices based on customers order and transaction type, determining the price tier, calculating the all fees, generating the Invoice report etc., should be automated and the users should be able to monitor and have control over all the actions if necessary

Multiple Stakeholder Market Orientation: A Conceptualization and Application in the Field of Destination Marketing

The market orientation (MO) paradigm suggests that generating and reacting to information from the product market facilitates the development of sustainable competitive advantage and enhanced organizational performance. However, the proliferation of MO as the dominant empirical approach for the investigation of the marketing concept has not gone unchallenged. Recently, proponents of “the stakeholder marketing movement” have suggested that the customer- and competitor-centric approaches characteristic of the currently accepted MO paradigm marginalize the increasingly important role of salient external stakeholders in the process of value creation. In the spirit of the stakeholder marketing perspective, the present research proposes a more broadly defined conceptualization of MO that acknowledges the role of salient external stakeholders in value creation, a phenomenon referred to herein as multiple stakeholder market orientation (MSMO). From the theoretical perspective of both stakeholder theory and the resource-based view of the firm, MSMO is positioned as a more appropriate conceptualization of the MO paradigm in terms of Kotler’s (1972a) generic concept of marketing as well as Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) service-dominant logic of marketing. Using these frameworks, a conceptual framework is derived in which MSMO is hypothesized to affect the development of relationally-based marketing assets. In turn, the competitive advantages attributable to these assets are proposed to positively affect organizational performance. This framework is developed and empirically tested within the context of the destination marketing industry. Because destination marketing organizations (DMOs) have a broad set of market and non-market stakeholders, this industry is an ideal context for the operationalization of MSMO as conceptualized above. In order to test the proposed framework, Churchill’s (1979) construct development process was used to develop measurements of the multidimensional MSMO, three stakeholder-specific asset categories (customer-based assets, industry-based assets, and politically-based assets), and organizational performance. Upon establishing operational definitions for these constructs, a measurement instrument was developed and disseminated to a sample of 600 destination marketing executives in the U.S. Using structural equation modeling, responses to the survey were used to (1) verify the proposed dimensional structure of MSMO and (2) test the relationships among MSMO and the asset- and performance-based constructs proposed within its nomology

Market fields structure & dynamics in industrial automation

There is a research tradition in the economics of standards which addresses standards wars, antitrust concerns or positive externalities from standards. Recent research has also dealt with the process characteristics of standardisation, de facto standard-setting consortia and intellectual property concerns in the technology specification or implementation phase. Nonetheless, there are no studies which analyse capabilities, comparative industry dynamics or incentive structures sufficiently in the context of standard-setting. In my study, I address the characteristics of collaborative research and standard-setting as a new mode of deploying assets beyond motivations well-known from R&D consortia or market alliances. On the basis of a case study of a leading user organisation in the market for industrial automation technology, but also a descriptive network analysis of cross-community affiliations, I demonstrate that there must be a paradoxical relationship between cooperation and competition. More precisely, I explain how there can be a dual relationship between value creation and value capture respecting exploration and exploitation. My case study emphasises the dynamics between knowledge stocks (knowledge alignment, narrowing and deepening) produced by collaborative standard setting and innovation; it also sheds light on an evolutional relationship between the exploration of assets and use cases and each firm's exploitation activities in the market. I derive standard-setting capabilities from an empirical analysis of membership structures, policies and incumbent firm characteristics in selected, but leading, user organisations. The results are as follows: the market for industrial automation technology is characterised by collaboration on standards, high technology influences of other industries and network effects on standards. Further, system integrators play a decisive role in value creation in the customer-specific business case. Standard-setting activities appear to be loosely coupled to the products offered on the market. Core leaders in world standards in industrial automation own a variety of assets and they are affiliated to many standard-setting communities rather than exclusively committed to a few standards. Furthermore, their R&D ratios outperform those of peripheral members and experience in standard-setting processes can be assumed. Standard-setting communities specify common core concepts as the basis for the development of each member's proprietary products, complementary technologies and industrial services. From a knowledge-based perspective, the targeted disclosure of certain knowledge can be used to achieve high innovation returns through systemic products which add proprietary features to open standards. Finally, the interplay between exploitation and exploration respecting the deployment of standard-setting capabilities linked to cooperative, pre-competitive processes leads to an evolution in common technology owned and exploited by the standard-setting community as a particular kind of innovation ecosystem. --standard-setting,innovation,industry dynamics and context,industrial automation