The production of real-world services involves a mixture of intangible and physical elements, including goods, actions, and the people required for delivery. In many cases, companies don?t offer just a single service to a customer but a more or less interrelated collection of them: service bundles. This enables broader, better coverage of customers? needs while achieving scale and scope efficiencies in service cost by sharing and reusing service elements. Both business analysis and the design of real-world service bundles stand to benefit from a semantic approach. The OBELIX project has developed a component-based ontology for real-world services, along with methods and tools for graphical modeling of services and for knowledge-based configuration of service bundles. It has tested the ontology, methods, and tools on real-world case studies in different industry sectors.
Index Terms:
semantic profiling of services, ontological engineering, knowledge-based configuration methods, validation by industrial use cases
Citation:
Hans Akkermans, Ziv Baida, Jaap Gordijn, Nieves Pe?, Ander Altuna, I?aki Laresgoiti, "Value Webs: Using Ontologies to Bundle Real-World Services," IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 57-66, July/Aug. 2004, doi:10.1109/MIS.2004.35