e-Services in a Networked World: From Semantics to Pragmatics

Today’s economy is a service economy, and an increasing number of services is electronic, i.e. can be ordered and provisioned online. Examples include Internet access, email and Voice over IP. Typically, e-services are offered as bundles consisting of more elementary services, offered by different suppliers, forming a network. This allows for best-of-breed solutions, in which the customer selects the best services from different suppliers to satisfy his need, and in which the supplier can focus on his core-competences. The research question is then how to compose such a multi-supplier service bundle. In this paper, we argue that first understanding of the context of the service is important. We propose a framework of ontologies, called efamily , which can be used to reason about the contextual socio-economical aspects of e-services. This framework can be used to elicit customer’s need, to compose service bundles satisfying such a need, and to reason about profitability of the found service provisioning network. We illustrate efamily by presenting two of its core-ontologies: evalue and eservice .