Towards an ontology and modeling approach for service science

Abstract

Service Science is an academic discipline that investigates the organization and operation of service systems and that designs novel solutions for their innovation, engineering and management. As a new interdisciplinary field, Service Science is in need of a solid conceptual foundation that could act as a unifying paradigm for researchers having backgrounds in different disciplines. Apart from common research abstractions and a shared vocabulary, the field would also benefit from modeling artifacts for studying and designing service systems. This paper reports on a research-in-progress that addresses these needs by developing a Service Science ontology, which will be elaborated as the meta-model of a new service system modeling language. The paper summarizes our current research results and contributes to the Service Science literature by presenting a new graphical conceptual model for service systems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.