e3service: An Ontological Approach for Deriving Multi-supplier IT-Service Bundles from Consumer Needs

IT services should not only be considered from a technical perspective, but should also be seen as commercial services that satisfy a consumer need. Examples include well-known services such as Internet access, an email box, VoIP, or web-page hosting, or more advanced services such as residential gateway management and content provisioning services. Typically, to satisfy a consumer need, a bundle of elementary services is required. In such a bundle, each elementary service can be offered by a different supplier. A key problem is then how to actually find service-bundles that satify consumer needs as close as possible. Because IT-service bundles can be automatically provisioned online immediately after ordering, finding a service bundle satisfying a need should preferably also happen automatically. To this end, we propose the eservice ontology, which offers constructs from service marketing, but in a computational way, such that automated reasoning support can be developed to match consumer needs with available IT services in the market. This paper presents the eservice ontology and explains it by a case study in the telecom industry