An enterprise ontology based approach to service specification

Abstract

Businesses operate in ever-changing business environments. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems must constantly adapt in order to meet changing business requirements. Yet, adaptation of ICT systems in order to cope with these changes is difficult, because ICT systems in an organization strongly cohere. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables ICT systems to cope with fast changing business requirements by providing ICT systems' functionalities as services to other ICT systems. Because of this, service specification takes an important role in the realization of SOA. It provides a description of the functionality that a service offers and how the service can be used. It was found, however, that current frameworks for specifying services insufficiently focus on business people. Business people have to be involved in service specification, because they need to validate whether a certain service really fulfil their needs for business process support. A business process is defined as an ordered collection of business activities. The Generic Service Specification Framework enables to deal with the issue above in order to specify services in SOA. The framework is based on the concept of enterprise ontology, which is able to give a clear overview of the business processes in the organization as an ordered collection of transactions. Since enterprise ontology clearly describes transactions without considering their realization and implementation using human beings and ICT systems, the concept of service could be identified from an ontological perspective. As a consequence, one can distinguish between services realized by human beings and services implemented using ICT systems, which we call business services and ICT services respectively. The Generic Service Specification Framework is applicable to business services and ICT services as well, which means that business activities as business services and services in SOA as ICT services can be specified in the same way. By this, the framework makes business people easier to validate ICT services, since each particular service aspect of ICT services and business services can be compared with each other.