Semantic Repositories for Service Provision: An Approach to Enhance the Business Perspective
Matteo Palmonari, Gianluigi Viscusi, Carlo Batini · BOA (University of Milano-Bicocca) · 2006
In business interactions, a major issue consists in enhancing the business perspective over service provision by developing strategies and tools to provide support in the choice of services according to the value they have for businesses. This means to provide (i) a way to determine the value of services according to specific business criteria, and (ii) technologies that support the sharing of such kind of knowledge involved in service provision. In this paper we present an approach based on the development of semantic repositories starting from our past experience with a repository built for the Italian Public Administration. The repository provides a business perspective over service provision, based on the association between services and business processes. The relevance of a value-based perspective on services modeling is related to the relevant problem of supporting businesses in the value-driven service selection. This perspective can be sensibly enhanced by exploiting expressive semantic representations and reasoning, in order to move towards the design of semantic repositories of services offering more intelligent service provision and supporting businesses in the service choice according to their value. In particular, we focus on how the semantic approach proposed can support the value-driven service selection, by presenting a case study.