Value Webs: Ontology-Based Bundling of Real-World Services

Real-world service production involves a mixture of intangible and physical elements, including goods, acts as well as people required for delivery. In many cases, companies are not offering just a single service to a customer, but a more or less interrelated collection of them: service bundles. This makes it possible to have a broader and better coverage of customers’ needs, and at the same time achieve scale and scope efficiencies in service cost by sharing and reusing service elements. In this article we show that business analysis and design of real-world service bundles stand to benefit from an interdisciplinary semantic approach. Specifically, we discuss a component-based ontology for real-world services, associated methods and tools for visual modelling, and knowledge-based configuration of service bundles, with applications from online events organization and the energy industry.