Titulo Estágio
MOONRISE: Modeling open semantic service relationships
Área Tecnológica
Sistemas de Informação
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
In recent years, services have generated a tremendous interest and uptake by researchers and by the industry. Robert Morris, Vice-President of Service Research at IBM, presented a keynote at the SRII 2011 Global Conference clearly stating ’that the future is moving to services; services are becoming compulsory and will take over the economy’. Extensive research has been done on services from a sales, communications and business models perspective (e.g. [ZBG08]), a software and IT perspective (e.g. [Erl05]), and a design perspective (e.g. [NRJK08]). As a next logical step, current developments are targeting the computer-understandable description of business services using comprehensive languages such as *-USDL (the Unified Service Description Language)[CBMK10, BO12]. Other influential efforts to better understand real world services include e3value and e3service modeling frameworks ([GYR06]). Three versions of USDL (alpha-USDL, USDL, and Linked-USDL) are available and vary on completeness and expressiveness. In the near future, these languages will allow formalizing business services and service systems in such a way that they can be used effectively for dynamic service outsourcing, efficient SaaS trading, and automatic service contract negotiation.
Current work targets the description of services which will be publicized on standalone marketplaces [CR11] and corporate Web sites. As a result, services will live in silos and it will not be possible to construct computer-understandable network models mirroring global service networks. Complementary, disjoint, equivalent, dependent, related, and similar services will exist on a number of online marketplaces without being related in any way. For the concept of service network to be materialized, the notion of rich, open, semantic business relationship needs to be explored and, afterward, the dynamic (re)creation and analysis of service networks needs to be supported by appropriate IT mechanisms. Vargo et al. [VL04], and others, have also perceived that we are moving into a service dominant society. Nonetheless, our knowledge on how global service networks operate is reduced and comes mainly from the field of supply chain management.
[CR11] CARDOSO, Jorge ; RUPINO, Paulo: Service Science: concepts, tools and platforms to support digital services for SME. In: Workshop on Enterprise Systems and Technology (I-WEST 2011), 2011
[Erl05] ERL, Thomas: Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA : Prentice Hall PTR, 2005
[CBMK10] CARDOSO, Jorge ; BARROS, Alistair ; MAY, Norman ; KYLAU, Uwe: Towards a Unified Service Description Language for the Internet of Services: Requirements and First Developments. In: IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. Florida, USA : IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010
[ZBG08] ZEITHAML, Valarie ; BITNER, Mary ; GREMLER, Dwayne: Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm. McGraw-Hill, 2008
[NRJK08] NENONEN, Suvi ; RASILA, Heidi ; JUNNONEN, Juha-Matti ; KAERNAE, Sam: Customer Journey - a method to investigate user experience. In: Proceedings of the Euro FM Conference Manchester, Rotterdam, Netherlands (in-house publishing), 2008, S. 54–63
[GYR06] GORDIJN, Jaap ; YU, Eric ; RAADT, Bas van d.: e-Service Design Using i* and e3value Modeling. In: IEEE Software 23 (2006), S. 26–33. http://dx.doi.org/http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2006.71. – DOI http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2006.71. – ISSN 0740–7459
[BO12] BARROS, A. ; OBERLE, D.: Handbook of Service Description: USDL and Its Methods. Springer, 2012. – ISBN 9781461418634
Objetivo
The objective of this project is to be able to represent and identify richer business relationships between services, so that the richness of the real world is not crammed inaccurately and inappropriately into very limited and inexpressive types of relationships. For example, simple relations provided by RDFS and OWL – such as rdfs:subClassOf, owl:EquivalentClass, rdf:seeAlso and owl:sameAs – are strict relationships which are not suitable to connect all the world’s services. In order to develop a model for rich business relationships, research from the areas of business management and supply chain networks is required. For example, Weill and Vitale [WV01] have introduced a set of simple schematics intended to provide tools for the analysis and design of business initiatives based on participants (firms of interest, customers, suppliers, and allies), relationships, and flows (e.g. of money, information, products, or services), which may provide a baseline for the work which needs to be done on service networks. In the same lines, Bovet and Martha [BM00] have also provided research results which need to be considered in our approach. They propose the concept of value net to define a network of partnerships which is a dynamic, high-performance network of customers/supplier partnerships and information flows. Since these research streams are relevant, it is indispensable to explore their use and applicability for service systems.
We propose to develop a core service relationship model called SRM which defines the main concepts and properties required to establish rich, multi-level relationships between service models encoded using Linked-USDL. In other words, services will be described with Linked-USDL and connected with SRM. Our idea behind the formalization of service networks is pragmatic and it is based on the objective of creating a connected global service network using computer-understandable descriptions. SRM aims to meet the needs of service stakeholders as service-centric platforms (e.g. marketplaces, procurement systems, corporate Web sites, service blogs and forums, etc.) become more prevalent on the Internet. Finding relevant relationships among service will become more important than ever for service providers and consumers. The e3value and e3service approaches have already identified a few relationships such as value exchange, core/enhancing and optional bundling. Relationships can be more expressive than simply establishing the added value of services when bundled together. Organizational, strategic, process and activity, social, KPI, and cause-effect relationships also need to be considered.
[WV01] WEILL, Peter ; VITALE, Michael: Place to space: migrating to ebusiness models. Harvard Business School Press, 2001
[BM00] BOVET, David ; MARTHA, Joseph: Value Nets, Breaking the Supply Chain to Unlock Hidden Profits. John Wiley and sons, Inc., 2000
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
(a) Identify a solid business use case definition which will show the value of modeling relationships and that will drive the research project until completion. Establish a dependency structure which expresses the relationships of MOONRISE with other efforts within the ISG research group. Identify synergies. Create project logo, vision statement, and expected results. Create wiki page and try to identify worldwide stakeholders. (September 2012)
(b) Discussion, collaboration, research and literature review to understand the possible relationship models which can be part of a SRM. Create a summary table with papers published on the topic. Specification of the requirements, tools, languages, models, and systems to be used. Explore the connection of KPI between USDL services. (November-December 2012).
(c) Architecture, design and modeling (December 2012 and January 2013) – Present a detailed analysis and definition of the modeling requirements for the SRM for USDL to be developed. Provide a design of the supporting/enabling system. Using rapid prototyping, illustrate the innovative concept of (draft) SRM for open semantic service networks.
(d) Writing and defense of mid-term report (December 2012 and January 2013).
(e) First prototype (February de 2013). Generate the first demo version of the system articulating the concept of rich semantic relationship model for USDL. Show it can be effectively used with the business use case definition (created in step a)). The prototype will help defining additional functional requirements and will also allow receiving feedback from the member of the group.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
(f) Construction (February and May 2013) – Programming and modeling the components, modules and ontologies defined. Enhance supporting Web site and develop a basic SRM registry. Define a second version of the business use cases to better illustrate the benefits of open semantic service networks.
(g) Testing (April and June de 2013) – Definition and execution of the acceptance tests of the various modules and ontologies developed. Receive and address feedback from KMI/The Open University and SAP Research. Create test cases and use cases.
(h) Documentation (running during the project) – Integration and revision of the documentation produced in each phase of the project into the final documentation which describe the work carried out technically and from a business perspective. Update weekly a wiki with the project information. Write the final version of the business use case.
(i) Writing and defense of the final report (May and July 2013). Final master thesis writing, coding, integration, testing, modeling, cleaning, etc. If time allows, take the final master thesis and formatted it with a suitable format to be submit to a conference. (Help will be provided).
Condições
This work will be carried out at DEI/Universidade de Coimbra within the Information System Group (ISG). A suitable space will be made available to students. Meetings will be held regularly (every week) with several students working on the business and cloud service descriptions using USDL and Linked-USDL.
Observações
Estagio elaborado para a Diana São Miguel
Orientador
Jorge Cardoso
jcardoso@dei.uc.pt 📩