Exploring Services Science

Abstract

In the last few years, service-oriented computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for describing Web services. There has not been as much work in defining languages or ontologies for describing services from business perspectives. In this paper, we analyze the landscape of service representation and discuss the needs of having a description language for business services. By leveraging existing work on describing service capabilities and properties, we define a specific description language that explicitly addresses the decomposition of business services and their non-functional properties. The language is defined both informally (as a list of descriptive concepts) and formally (by means of meta-modeling and declarative modeling).