Research Topics

Service Ontology

Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have already benefitted 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 project 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.

Service Semantics Classification

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 project proposes a semantics classification scheme based on service aspects that are essential for a services ecosystem.

Service Ontology

Service Processs

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.

Core Template

Designing Service Science Curriculum

The recent growth in the services sector implies that increasingly more people are being employed in this sector. This trend is starting to influence policy and investment decisions of governments, industries and academia. Governments traditionally focus on social welfare, and industries strive for profit, while academia should search for fundamental knowledge and provide the training of skilled personnel. The uptake of services implies that more professionals must be trained in this area to fulfil the services sector needs. Services are characterised by their uniqueness, high customisation and value-added personal experience, and are delivered in diverse and dynamic environments. This implies that a science for services has to be multi-disciplinary, professional skills should be diverse, and flexibility is a crucial competence to be attained by professionals. However, services in different areas and at different levels comply with stable life-cycle patterns that determine the activities to be performed by professionals. From these observations we can conclude that services professionals should have a ‘T-shaped’ profile: they should have general knowledge of multi-disciplinary concepts, techniques and theories in science, management and engineering that are relevant for services, but specialise in some particular aspects in order to make concrete contributions to the field (in academia or industry). Although this profile is quite clear and has been sketched before, recent surveys have revealed some shortage of professionals with these skills and knowledge. Reasons for this shortage include the lack of a general theory of services, underestimation of the importance of the services-related activities, unclear branding of services science in the students community, and the inability to claim intellectual property rights of services. This calls for a services science discipline as a research field, with its corresponding education programme. This also inspired us to develop a Services Science Graduation Programme at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, in which we propose a study programme of five years, consisting of a Master phase of two years and a PhD phase of three years.

This paper reports on our efforts to develop a services science graduation programme. We have applied a combined top-down/bottom-up approach, in which we identified the topics to be addressed in such a programme from the literature and the courses given at other institutions (top-down), and matched these topics with the courses available at our university from the Computer Science and Business Information Technology programmes (bottom-up). The use of available courses has been crucial to define a programme that can be introduced right away, while the top-down list of topics will allow us to tune the programme in the next years. In our initial study we catalogued 350 courses offered in 35 programmes related to services science worldwide. The topics have been organised according to a generic life-cycle model, in an attempt to define an ‘ideal’ services science programme. We conclude that although we have reused available courses, we are not far from our ideal services science programme. Furthermore, we believe that the necessary specialisation can still be attained by means of projects and traineeships.

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Home Research Publications Education Experience	Applied Science of Services for Information Society Technologies (ASSIST) Research Topics Service Ontology Analysis of Service Ontologies Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have already benefitted 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 project 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. Service Semantics Classification 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 project proposes a semantics classification scheme based on service aspects that are essential for a services ecosystem. Service Processs 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. Designing Service Science Curriculum The recent growth in the services sector implies that increasingly more people are being employed in this sector. This trend is starting to influence policy and investment decisions of governments, industries and academia. Governments traditionally focus on social welfare, and industries strive for profit, while academia should search for fundamental knowledge and provide the training of skilled personnel. The uptake of services implies that more professionals must be trained in this area to fulfil the services sector needs. Services are characterised by their uniqueness, high customisation and value-added personal experience, and are delivered in diverse and dynamic environments. This implies that a science for services has to be multi-disciplinary, professional skills should be diverse, and flexibility is a crucial competence to be attained by professionals. However, services in different areas and at different levels comply with stable life-cycle patterns that determine the activities to be performed by professionals. From these observations we can conclude that services professionals should have a ‘T-shaped’ profile: they should have general knowledge of multi-disciplinary concepts, techniques and theories in science, management and engineering that are relevant for services, but specialise in some particular aspects in order to make concrete contributions to the field (in academia or industry). Although this profile is quite clear and has been sketched before, recent surveys have revealed some shortage of professionals with these skills and knowledge. Reasons for this shortage include the lack of a general theory of services, underestimation of the importance of the services-related activities, unclear branding of services science in the students community, and the inability to claim intellectual property rights of services. This calls for a services science discipline as a research field, with its corresponding education programme. This also inspired us to develop a Services Science Graduation Programme at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, in which we propose a study programme of five years, consisting of a Master phase of two years and a PhD phase of three years. This paper reports on our efforts to develop a services science graduation programme. We have applied a combined top-down/bottom-up approach, in which we identified the topics to be addressed in such a programme from the literature and the courses given at other institutions (top-down), and matched these topics with the courses available at our university from the Computer Science and Business Information Technology programmes (bottom-up). The use of available courses has been crucial to define a programme that can be introduced right away, while the top-down list of topics will allow us to tune the programme in the next years. In our initial study we catalogued 350 courses offered in 35 programmes related to services science worldwide. The topics have been organised according to a generic life-cycle model, in an attempt to define an ‘ideal’ services science programme. We conclude that although we have reused available courses, we are not far from our ideal services science programme. Furthermore, we believe that the necessary specialisation can still be attained by means of projects and traineeships.