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

Towards a Unifying Process Framework for Services Knowledge Management

Activities concerned with the design, planning and execution of services are becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the involvement of many different stakeholders, the complexity of the service systems themselves, and the dynamic nature of their organizational and ICT environments. Service knowledge management helps share and reuse relevant knowledge among the different stakeholders, and therefore emerges as a critical factor to perform service activities with required efficiency and quality. Recent advances in knowledge management provide promising opportunities to support individual service activities within a single domain. Yet, sharing knowledge throughout the service life-cycle and across service domains is still very challenging. The source of service knowledge, its usage, update frequency, encoding and associated stakeholders may vary depending upon the service activity and the service domain. Based on a critical analysis of currently proposed frameworks, we argue that a process framework approach is beneficial for service knowledge management. To support our claim, we offer an abstract template and a typical service life-cycle that can be adopted to integrate heterogeneous service knowledge from diverse sources

Service Semantics Classification: an Approach Towards Modular Service Ontology

Since service systems are becoming increasingly complex in emerging technology, business, legal and economics environments, service abstractions are necessary to master this complexity. However, the term ‘service’ means different things to different people in different disciplines, which implies that any attempt to define general purpose service abstractions must address the disambiguation of the term. Service ontologies and service knowledge management efforts mainly aim at elucidating service semantics. Each discipline has multiple biased service-related concepts, so that in order to build comprehensive multi-disciplinary service models, the service-related concepts of the involved disciplines have to be integrated and structured in a consistent way. We claim that this requires a modular approach in which general purpose service semantics can be further extended or specialised with domain-specific concepts. Service-related and domain-specific concepts can be integrated and structured in many different ways. This paper proposes a semantics classification scheme based on service aspects that are essential for a services ecosystem

SEMANTIC SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS FOR THE ENTERPRISE

Business processes are generally fixed and enforced strictly, as reflected by the static nature of underlying software systems and datasets. However, internal and external situations, organizational changes and various other factors trigger dynamism, which is reflected in the form of issues, complains, Q&A, opinions, reviews, etc, over a plethora of communication channels, such as email, chat, discussion forums, and internal social network. Careful and timely analysis and processing of such channels may lead to early detection of emerging trends, critical issues, opportunities, topics of interests, contributors, experts etc. Social network analytics have been successfully applied in general purpose, online social network platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. However, in order for such techniques to be useful in business context, it is mandatory to integrate them with underlying business systems, processes and practices. Such integration problem is increasingly recognized as Big Data problem. We argue that SemanticWeb technology applied with social network analytics can solve enterprise knowledge management, while achieving integration

Towards a Conceptual Framework to Support Dynamic Service Provisioning for Non-Technical Service Clients

Recently, paradigms such as Service-Oriented and Pervasive Computing are being combined and applied in scenarios where users are surrounded by a plethora of computing devices and available services. Dealing with a potentially large number of devices and services can become overwhelming to users without appropriate software support. Moreover, in the case of non-technical users, an additional difficulty is to express service requests using technical concepts such as data types, XML documents, etc. In this paper we present a conceptual framework that aims at supporting the service provisioning for non-technical users, and we focus on the design and operation of the framework's software platform. The platform also makes use of computing devices that surround the users to collect contextual information that helps in the tasks of service discovery, selection and composition