Value Webs: Ontology-Based Bundling of Real-World Services
Hans Akkermans, Ziv Baida, Jaap Gordijn, De Boelelaan, Nieves Pe, Ander Altuna · 2004
Real-world service production involves a mixture of in-tangible and physical elements, including goods, acts as well as people required for delivery. In many cases, com-panies 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 bet-ter coverage of customers ’ needs, and at the same time achieve scale and scope efficiencies in service cost by shar-ing and reusing service elements. In this article we show that business analysis and design of real-world service bun-dles stand to benefit from an interdisciplinary semantic ap-proach. Specifically, we discuss a component-based ontol-ogy for real-world services, associated methods and tools for visual modelling, and knowledge-based configuration of service bundles, with applications from online events orga-nization and the energy industry.