Semantics to Energize the Full Services Spectrum: Ontological Approach to Better Exploit Services at Technical and Business Levels

Services are pervasive in today’s economic landscape, and services- based architectures are being rapidly adopted as IT infrastructure. The need to take a broader perspective of services to include people and organizational descriptions as opposed to technical interface descriptions has already been recognized as part of an overall vision of services science [46, 100]. This article describes the Semantic Services Science (3S) model, which seeks to demonstrate the essential benefits of semantics in view of the broader vision of services science by using service descriptions that capture technical, human, organizational, and business value aspects. We assert that ontology-based semantic modeling and descriptions can be used to energize services across the broad service spectrum. In this article, we demonstrate how the 3S approach could be used along three points in this spectrum: semantic descriptions of standard Web services with the help of WSDL-S, semantic policies, and agreements; semantic descriptions of lightweight Web services using Web 2.0 technologies (such as REST and AJAX); and ontology-based profiling of people and organizational aspects of the assets associated with the knowledge services