Eservice: a Model-based Approach for Generating Needs-driven E-service Bundles in a Networked Enterprise

e-Services are just like normal services, but can be ordered and provisioned via the Internet completely. Increasingly, these e-services are offered as a multi-supplier bundle of elementary services. How to automatically compose these e-service bundles is considered as a key problem. Part of the composition process is to elicit the customer need for an e-service bundle, and to facilitate this elicitation process by a web-enabled software component. To this end, we need a computer-processable theory, called an ontology, which is able to represent customer needs, and also facilitates computer-supported elicitation of needs. In this paper, we propose the eservice ontology that does just that. The ontology represents needs, wants, demands, benefits, and related constructs, to build a customer-oriented catalogue of customer needs for e-services, which in turn can be used during the need-elicitation process for a specific customer. We show how the eservice ontology works in practice, by using a case study carried out in the field about postal