Pii: S0140-3664(00)00230-9

The advent of deregulation combined with new opportunities opened by advances in telecommunications technologies has signi®cantly changed the paradigm of telecommunications services, leading to a dramatic increase in the number and type of services that telecommunication companies can offer. Building new advanced multimedia telecommunications services in a distributed and heterogeneous environment is very dif®cult, unless there is a methodology to support the entire service development process in a structured and systematic manner, and assist and constrain service designers and developers by setting out goals and providing speci®c means to achieve these goals. Therefore, in this paper, after a brief examination of important service engineering matters and service modelling issues, a service creation methodology a proposed and presented focusing on its essential characteristics. The application of this methodology to the development of a multimedia conferencing service for education and training is then examined and a possible enhancement of the methodology through the use of design patterns and frameworks is considered ®nally. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.