Service Ontology

The ontology covers the domain-independent aspects modeling of service events and service offerings. It does not cover the modeling of the service sectoras a category in the classification of economies.

The account of services addressed is not that of Information Technology, so Web services and the like are out of scope.

Related ontologies and models
The EU Project OBELIX described a RDF service ontology in its [http://www.cs.vu.nl/~obelix/D6.1.pdf deliverable D6.1. "Service ontology specification"]. That model divided the ontology in three viewpoints: service value (the customer perspective), service offering (the supplier perspective) and service process (how the service is actually performed). Some of the elements in that ontology have served as a point of departure for the service ontology described here.

The REA ontology is also relevant here, since it deals with the economic and accountancy aspects of events, which obviously include service provision.

Demands and service events


s are s originated by individual  s or  s, and eventually, some   fulfills them. Even the purchase of goods can be modeled as a service event.

Demands have a concrete  representing the willingness to pay of the customer. Other kind of non-monetary costs could be added to the ontology, but they are not provided here since they are in many cases domain--dependent.

Needs, wants and demands
The literature on service management differentiates needs, wants and demands. Human needs are states of felt deprivation. They include basic physical needs for food or clothingbut also individual and social needs for knowledge and self-expression. Even though demands ultimately come from human needs, needs are rather generic and their utility in a ontology for representing services is dubious.

Wants are the form taken by human needs as they are shaped by culture and individual personality. A hungry person in a given country would want particular kinds of food that would rarely be wanted by people in distant geographical an cultural areas. Modeling wants does not add much to demands, since demands are actually the expression of wants. However, it is still useful for classification to have a concept of  and a subsumed concept. Want types are independent from contraints, while demands are by definition constrained by price and other factors. Concrete demands are  some demand types or need types.

Service offerings
TBC

Download

 * 1) Demands sub-ontology: version 0.5