An Enterprise Ontology-Based Approach to Service Specification

Abstract

standards arose as ad hoc standards for the definition of service interfaces and service registries. However, even together these standards do not provide enough basis for a service consumer to get a full understanding of the behavior of a service. In practice, this often leads to a serious mismatch between the provider's intent and the consumer's expectations concerning the functionality of the corresponding service. Though additional standards have been proposed, a holistic view of what aspects of a service need to be specified is still lacking. This paper proposes a service definition, a service classification, and service specification framework, all based on a founded theory, the É-theory. The É-theory originates from the scientific fields of Language Philosophy and Systemic Ontology. According to this theory, the operation of organizations is all about communication between and production by social actors. The service specification framework can be applied both for specifying human services, i.e., services executed by human beings, and IT services (i.e., services executed by IT systems).

Holonic Ontology and Interaction Protocol for Manufacturing Network Organization

“…Development in ontology theory is being standardized. These standards are enabling the rectification of serious mismatch between intents of service providers and expectations of consumers in terms of the functionality required of the service [31]. Ontology mechanism for mapping, alignment, and merging of heterogeneous ontologies are being developed to replace huge object model files which are time consuming to generate [32].…”

Using DEMO to Identify IT Services

“…Another contribution to the service identification problem is the Generic Service Specification Framework (GSSF) that defines four main areas of concern for each service: the service executor, the service production, the service coordination and the service contract option [13].…”

Using DEMO-based SLAs for Improving City Council Services

“…Another contribution to the gaps problem is the Generic Service Specification Framework (GSFF) (Terlouw & Albani, 2011), which is based on the following generic service definition (Albani, Terlouw, Hardjosumarto, & Dietz, 2009): a service is a universal pattern of coordination and production acts, performed by the executor of a transaction for the benefit of its initiator, in the order stated in the standard pattern of a transaction.…”

“…Even though the quality aspects are very basic, the Generic Service Specification Framework represents a large contribution to the service specification research area. However, the level of service quality specification is not always sufficient, because sometimes customers and providers have different expectations due to a lack of specification (Terlouw & Albani, 2011).…”

“…The second step of the proposal is to apply part of the GSSF (Terlouw & Albani, 2011): service executor, service production and service coordination. The service executor area defines who the provider of the service is; the service production area focuses on the production act to be performed by the executor; and the service coordination area gives the consumer all the information required for conducting a successful communication with the provider.…”