The Configurable Nature of Real-World Services: Analysis and Demonstration

A collaborative design of complex real-world services (ranging from plumbing services, transportation, network connectivity and events hosting to insurances and governmental public services) over the WWW requires services to be described as components, the building blocks of a configuration. Defining complex services then becomes a traditional configuration task, where services are seen as components. Reducing the process of defining complex services into a configuration task (as studied in knowledge engineering) implies that it can be supported by information technology, to be used either by service personnel or by customers via the Internet. Furthermore, to facilitate service configuration by customers, it is required that the customer value of services is linked to services – or service elements – that shall be configured. A subset of the service outcomes, very often intangible, reflects the customer value of a service, in supply-side terms. In this paper we describe the component-like nature of services, in the framework of a service ontology comprising of the customer value (demand-side terms) as well as a supply-side, component-based description of services. We demonstrate the process of configuring – or bundling – services with a case study on hosting a meeting.