e3service: An ontology for needs-driven real-world service bundling in a multi-supplier setting

Abstract

Businesses increasingly offer their services electronically via the Web. Take for example an Internet Service Provider. An ISP offers a variety of services, including raw bandwidth, IP connectivity, and Domain Name resolution. Although in some cases a single service already satisfies a customer need, in many situations a customer need is so complex that a bundle of services is needed to satisfy the need, as with the ISP example. In principle, each service in a bundle can be provisioned by a different supplier. This paper proposes an ontology, e 3 service, that can be used to formally capture customer needs, services, and multi-supplier service bundles of these. In addition, this paper contributes a process called PCM 2 to reason with the ontology. First, a customer need is identified for which desired consequences are elicited. Then, the desired set of consequences is matched with consequences associated with services. The matching process results in a service bundle, satisfying the customer need, containing services that each can be provided by different suppliers. PCM 2 is inspired by a family of formal reasoning methods called Propose-Critique-Modify (PCM). However, whereas PCM methods emphasize solution generation from a given set of requirements, our reasoning process treats the space of requirements as a first class citizen. Hence PCM 2 : the requirements space and solution space are equally important. How the reasoning and matching process practically works, is illustrated by an industry strength case study in the healthcare domain. S. De Kinderen et al. / An ontology for needs-driven service bundling in a multi-supplier settingName resolution; but additional services, such as an email box, chat box, Voice over IP (VoIP), or Instant Messaging (IM) may be offered as well.Although many customers may deal with just one ISP to have all their Internet-related needs satisfied, this is not always strictly necessary or possible. The above-mentioned basic ISP services may each be provided in their own right, and so by different suppliers. For example, the customer may obtain raw bandwidth from supplier S 1 , IP connectivity and Domain Name resolution from supplier S 2 , and an email box from yet another supplier. Partnering enables suppliers to cooperate and satisfy complex customer needs they never could have done on their own in a flexible way. This phenomenon is increasingly observed in e-commerce settings, especially when small enterprises come into play (see e.g. Tapscott et al., 2000).Multi-supplier bundles often satisfy customer's need much better and cheaper, as opposed to a single supplier bundle. Moreover, fixed single supplier service offerings often contains unwanted services such as an ill-functioning spam filter of an email service with poor storage capabilities. Given this explosion of possible combinations, it is a technological challenge to provide automated support for composing the most optimal bundle in response to an individual's unique needs, and by doing so build long-term partnerships among ...