Daniel Oberle

A unified description language for human to automated services

Through the rise of cloud computing, on-demand applications, and business networks, services are increasingly being exposed and delivered on the Internet and through mobile communications. So far, services have mainly been described through technical interface descriptions. The description of business details, such as pricing, service-level, or licensing, has been neglected and is therefore hard to automatically process by service consumers. Also, third-party intermediaries, such as brokers, cloud providers, or channel partners, are interested in the business details in order to extend services and their delivery and, thus, further monetize services. In this paper, the constructivist design of the UnifiedServiceDescriptionLanguage (USDL), aimed at describing services across the human-to-automation continuum, is presented. The proposal of USDL follows well-defined requirements which are expressed against a common service discourse and synthesized from currently available servicedescription efforts. USDLs concepts and modules are evaluated for their support of the different requirements and use cases.

Handbook of service description

With the growth in number and sophistication of services widely available, there is a new urgency for comprehensive service descriptions that take into account both technical and business aspects. The last years have seen a number of efforts for best-of-breed service description focusing on specific aspects of services. The Handbook of Service Description provides the most advanced state of the art insights into these. The main parts of the book provide the most detailed documentation of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) to date. USDL has been developed across several research institutes and publicly funded projects across Europe and Australia, currently extending to the Americas as part of a standardization push through W3C. The scope of services extends across IT and business, i.e., the socio-technical sense of services scaled to business networks. In this respect, purely human, purely automated and mixed human/automated services were considered, that have a boundary of cognizance that is available through the tasks of service provisioning, discovery, access and delivery. Taken together, the Handbook of Service Description provides a comprehensive reference suitable for a wide-reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service description and its methodological aspects.

The Internet of Services and USDL

A prominent research focus, especially in the context of EU public funding, has been the systematic use of the Internet for new ways of value creation in the services sector. This idea of service networks in the Internet, frequently dubbed the Internet of Services orWeb service ecosystems, wants to make services tradable in digital media. In order to enable communication and trade between providers and consumers of services, the Internet of Services requires a standard that creates a “commercial envelope” around a service. This is where the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) comes into play as a normative and balanced unification of service information. The unified description established by USDL is machineprocessable, considers technical and business aspects of a service as well as functional and non-functional attributes.

Texo: Wie Theseus das Internet der Dienste Gestaltet — Perspektiven der Verwertung

Das Internet hat in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten eine Reihe radikaler Aderungen in Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft mit sich gebracht. Die erste Welle bezog sich auf den Umgang mit wissenschaftlichen Publikationen und Daten. Das World Wide Web revolutionierte die Art, wie Dokumente und Informationen dargestellt und ausgetauscht wurden. In einer folgenden Welle entstanden einfache kommerzielle Systeme. In den Web Shops und Verkaufsplattformen wurden Kommoditaten wie Bucher, Musik CDs oder gebrauchte Gegenstande gehandelt. Auch erste Ansatze fur geschaftliche Prozesse zwischen Unternehmen — beispielsweise in der Beschaffung — wurden realisiert.

An architecture for information exchange based on reference models

The goal of reference models is to establish a common vocabulary and recently also to facilitate semantically unambiguous information exchange between IT systems. However, IT systems are based on implementation models that typically deviate significantly from the reference models. This raises the need for a mapping mechanism, which is flexible enough to cope with the disparities between implementation model and reference model at runtime and on instance level, and which can be implemented without altering the established IT system. We present an architecture that solves this problem by establishing methods for representing the instances of an existing IT-System in terms of a reference model. Based on rules, the concrete nature of the representation is decided at run time. Albeit our approach is entirely domain independent, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in an industrial case study from the Oil and Gas domain, using the ISO 15926 ontology as a reference model and mapping it to different Java and Flex implementation models.

Mapping pragmatic class models to reference ontologies

Capturing a domain of discourse in an object-oriented class model and in a reference ontology leads to different results. On the one hand, modeling decisions for class models are motivated by pragmatic and efficiency-related choices because modeling decisions are motivated by different choices. However, information integration scenarios require a coexistence between reference ontologies and class models at runtime. When implementing an integration scenario, objects need to be transformed between both types of models, thus requiring expressive, executable, and bidirectional mappings. In this paper, we present a novel approach for a bidirectional mapping between a class model and an ontology. The approach is both non-intrusive and dynamic. That means it can be integrated in existing IT systems without having to change the class model and it does not rely on static 1∶1 mappings, respectively.

Design Overview of USDL

Enabling Web-based service networks and ecosystems requires a way of describing services by a “commercial envelope” as discussed in Chapter 1. A uniform conception of services across all walks of life (including technical services) is required capturing business, operational and technical aspects. Therefore, our proposed Unified Service Description Language (USDL) particularly draws from and generalizes the best-of-breed approaches presented in Part I. The following chapter presents the design rationale of USDL where the different aspects are put in a framework of descriptions requirements. This is followed by the subsequent chapters of this part that provide details on specific aspects such as pricing or legal issues.

Towards a reusable and executable pricing model in the internet of services

The Internet of Services envisions the trading of services where pricing information is an important aspect to enable cost comparisons. So far, there is a lack of a comprehensive pricing model that can be reused in different settings. XML-based electronic product catalogs are not comprehensive enough and established enterprise applications or billing engines bury their pricing model in the source code. Therefore, we present a directly applicable pricing model in the form of an ontology. We also contribute a runtime environment that determines the price on the basis of a context-aware declarative service description.

Conclusion and Outlooks

Congratulations! We have covered a lot of ground of the ODSD infrastructure together, in the four parts that we have just walked over.

Logische Komponente zur Rechtsfolgenermittlung

Nachdem die Rechtsbegriffs- und Sachverhaltsontologie mit Hilfe der formalen Sprache spezifiziert sind, existiert nun die Herausforderung damit Rechtsfolgenermittlung durchzufuhren. Dazu dient die logische Komponente zur Rechtsfolgenermittlung (vgl. auch Abbildung 12.1 auf Seite 282), welche in diesem Abschnitt naher beschrieben wird. Herzstuck des logischen Systems zur Rechtsfolgenermittlung ist ein Inferenzsystem. Im Wesentlichen handelt es sich bei einem Inferenzsystem um die Realisierung eines logischen Kalkuls fur die formale Sprache.