License-aware Service Selection

The distribution of services spanning across organizational boundaries raises problems related to intellectual value that are less explored in current service oriented research. Being a way to manage the intellectual rights between service consumers and service providers, licenses are critical to be considered in services. A service license describes the terms and conditions for the use and access of the service in a machine interpretable way. The proliferation of services that offer similar functionalities requires the selection process to be enhanced together with consideration of licenses. In this paper, we analyze current service licensing practices and present a novel approach for service selection process based on matching the offered licensing specifications (primarily dealing with scope of rights and financial terms) by providers with the requested licensing specifications by consumers.