Ontological representation and governance of business semantics in compliant service networks

Abstract

The Internet would enable new ways for service innovation and trading, as well as for analysing the resulting value networks, with an unprecedented level of scale and dynamics. Yet most related economic activities remain of a largely brittle and manual nature. Service-oriented business implementations focus on operational aspects at the cost of value creation aspects such as quality and regulatory compliance. Indeed they enforce how to carry out a certain business in a prefixed non-adaptive manner rather than capturing the semantics of a business domain in a way that would enable service systems to adapt their role in changing value propositions. In this paper we set requirements for SDL-compliant business service semantics, and propose a method for their ontological representation and governance. We demonstrate an implementation of our approach in the context of service-oriented Information Governance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.