e3service: An ontology for needs-driven real-world service bundling in a multi-supplier setting

Businesses increasingly offer their services electronically via the Web. Take for example an Internet Service Provider. An ISP offers a variety of services, including raw bandwidth, IP connectivity, and Domain Name resolution. Although in some cases a single service already satisfies a customer need, in many situations a customer need is so complex that a bundle of services is needed to satisfy the need, as with the ISP example. In principle, each service in a bundle can be provisioned by a different supplier. This paper proposes an ontology, e3service, that can be used to formally capture customer needs, services, and multi-supplier service bundles of these. In addition, this paper contributes a process called PCM2 to reason with the ontology. First, a customer need is identified for which desired consequences are elicited. Then, the desired set of consequences is matched with consequences associated with services. The matching process results in a service bundle, satisfying the customer need, containing services that each can be provided by different suppliers. PCM2 is inspired by a family of formal reasoning methods called Propose--Critique--Modify PCM. However, whereas PCM methods emphasize solution generation from a given set of requirements, our reasoning process treats the space of requirements as a first class citizen. Hence PCM2: the requirements space and solution space are equally important. How the reasoning and matching process practically works, is illustrated by an industry strength case study in the healthcare domain.