Abstract
A proper understanding of the general nature, potential and obligations of electronic services may be achieved by examining existing commercial services in detail. The everyday services that surround us, and the ways in which we engage with them, are the result of social and economic interaction that has taken place over a long period of time. If we attempt to provide electronic services, and do not take this history into account, then we will fail. Any attempt to provide automated electronic services that ignores this history will deny consumers the opportunity to negotiate and refine, over a large range of issues, the specific details of the actual service to be provided. To succeed, we require a rich and accurate means of representing services. An essential ingredient of service representation is capturing the non-functional properties of services. These include the methods of charging and payment, the channels by which the service is requested and provided, constraints on temporal and spatial availability, service quality, security, trust and the rights attached to a service. Not only are comprehensive descriptions essential for useful service discovery, they are also integral to service management, enabling service negotiation, composition, and substitution. This paper builds on an understanding of services and their interactions, to outline the non-functional properties of services and their uses.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
J.F. Allen, “Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 26, no.11, pp. 832–843, 1983.
J.F. Allen, “Planning as temporal reasoning,” in J. Allen, R. Fikes, and E. Sandewall (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'91)- Reprinted, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1991, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers: San Mateo, CA.
J.F. Allen, “Time and time again: The many ways to represent time,” International Journal of Intelligent Systems, vol. 6, no.4, pp. 341–356, 1991.
A. Ankolekar, M. Burstein, J.R. Hobbs, O. Lassila, D.L. Martin, S.A. McIlraith, S. Narayanan, M. Paolucci, T. Payne, K. Sycara, and H. Zeng, “DAML-S: Semantic markup for web services,” in Proceedings of the First International SemanticWebWorking Symposium (SWWS): Infrastructure and Applications for the Semantic Web, Stanford University, CA, USA, 2001, pp. 411–430.
C. Aurrecoechea, A.T. Campbell, and L. Hauw, “A survey of QoS architectures,” ACM/Springer-Verlag Multimedia Systems Journal (Special Issue on QoS Architecture), vol. 6, no.3, pp. 138–151, 1998.
D. Beringer, H. Kuno, and M. Lemon, “Using WSCL in a UDDI registry 1.02: UDDI working draft best practices document,” May 2001. Available from http://www.uddi.org/pubs/wsclBP forUDDI 5 16 011.pdf, accessed on 15 Nov. 2001.
C. Bettini, X.S. Wang, and S. Jajodia, “A general framework and reasoning models for time granularity,” in L. Chittaro, S.D. Goodwin, H.J. Hamilton, and A. Montanari (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME'96), Key West, Florida, USA, 1996, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 104–111.
W. Caelli, D. Longley, and M. Shain, Information Security Handbook, Macmillan Publishers: New York, USA, 1991.
A. Campbell, G. Coulson, and D. Hutchison, “A quality of service architecture,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 24, no.2, pp. 6–27, 1994.
F. Casati, S. Ilnicki, L. Jin, V. Krishnamoorthy, and M.-C. Shan, “Adaptive and dynamic service composition in eFlow,” Technical Report HPL-2000-39, Hewlett Packard Software Technology Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA, USA, March 2000. Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-39.html, accessed on 27 Dec. 2000.
H. Chen, D. Chakraborty, L. Xu, A. Joshi, and T. Finin, “Service discovery in the future electronic market,” in Workshop on Knowledge-Based Electronic Markets (KBEM'00)-Proceedings of the 17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-00), Austin, Texas, USA, 2000, AAAI Press/MIT Press, pp. 1–6.
E. Christensen, G. Meredith, F. Curbera, and S. Weerawarana, “Web services description language (WSDL) 1.1. W3C Note, Ariba, Microsoft and IBM corporation,” March 2001. Available from http://www.w3. org/TR/2001/NOTE-wsdl-20010315, accessed on 26 June 2001.
L. Chung, “Non-functional requirements for information system design,” in R. Andersen, J.A. Bubenko Jnr, and A. Sølvberg (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering-CAiSE'91, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Trodheim, Norway, 1991, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, pp. 5–30.
J. Clifford, C. Dyreson, T. Isakowitz, C.S. Jensen, and R. Snodgrass, “On the semantics of “Now” in databases,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, vol. 22, no.2, pp. 171–214, 1997.
A.G. Cohn and S.M. Hazarika, “Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning: An overview,” Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 46, no.1/2, pp. 2–32, 2001.
S.E. Czerwinski, B.Y. Zhao, T.D. Hodes, A.D. Joseph, and R.H. Katz, “An architecture for a secure service discovery service,” in T. Imielinski and M. Steenstrup (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom' 99), Seattle,Washington, USA, 1999, ACM: New York, pp. 24–35.
K. Decker, M. Williamson, and K. Sycara, “Matchmaking and brokering,” in Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-96), Kyoto, Japan, 1996, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, pp. 1–19.
Discovery Universal Description and Integration (UDDI). UDDI Version 2.0 API Specification, June 2001. Available from http://www.uddi.org/pubs/ProgrammersAPI-V2.00-Open-20010608.pdf, accessed on 22 June 2001.
A. Dogac and I. Cingil, “A survey and comparison of business-to-business E-commerce frameworks,” ACM SIGecom Exchanges, vol. 2, no.2, pp. 16–27, 2001.
M. Dumas, J. O'sullivan, M. Heravizadeh, D. Edmond, and A. ter Hofstede, “Towards a semantic framework for service description,” in Proceedings of the 9th International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Conference on Database Semantics-Semantic Issues in e-Commerce Systems, Hong Kong, China, 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht.
A. Durante, D. Bell, L. Goldstein, J. Gustafson, and H. Kuno, “A model for the E-service marketplace,” Technical Report HPL-2001-17, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, USA, Feb. 2000. Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-17.pdf, access on 31 Aug. 2001.
A.S. Fotheringham and M. Wegener (Eds.), Spatial Models and GIS: New Potential and New Models, vol. 7 of GISData, Taylor and Francis: London, England, 2000.
F. Griffel, M. Boger, H. Weinreich, W. Lamersdorf, and M. Merz, “Electronic contracting with COSMOS- How to establish, negotiate and execute electronic contracts on the internet,” in Z.M.C. Kobryn and C. Atkinson (Eds.), Proceedings of the IEEE/OMG 2nd International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop (EDOC'98), La Jolla, CA, USA, 1998, IEEE Publishing.
International Organization for Standardization. ISO 8601:2000, 2000. Available from http://www. iso.ch, accessed on 07 June 2001.
N.R. Jennings, T.J. Norman, P. Faratin, P. O'Brien, and B. Odgers, “Autonomous agents for business process management,” Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, vol. 14, no.2, pp. 145–189, 2000.
C.S. Jensen, J. Clifford, S.K. Gadia, A. Segev, and R.T. Snodgrass, “Aglossary of temporal database concepts,” SIGMOD Record, vol. 21, no.3, pp. 35–43, 1992.
D. Kuebler and W. Eibach, “Metering and accounting for Web services,” July 2001. Available from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-maws/?n-ws-7191, accessed on 31 July 2001.
A. Lazcano, G. Alonso, H. Schuldt, and C. Schuler, “The WISE approach to electronic commerce,” International Journal of Computer Systems Science & Engineering, Special issue on Flexible Workflow Technology Driving the Networked Economy, vol. 15, no.5, pp. 343–355, 2000.
R.C. Lewis and B.H. Booms, “The marketing aspects of service quality,” in L. Berry, G. Shostack, and G. Upah (Eds.), Emerging Perspectives in Services Marketing, American Marketing Association: Chicago, IL, USA, 1983, pp. 99–104.
F. Leymann, “Web services flow language (WSFL 1.0),” May 2001. Available from http://www.ibm. com/software/solutions/webservices/pdf/WSFL.pdf, accessed on 13 Aug. 2001.
J.K. MacKie-Mason and K. White, “Evaluating and selecting digital payment mechanisms,” in G.L Rosston and D. Waterman (Eds.), Interconnection and the Internet. Selected Papers from the 1996 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ, USA, 1997, pp. 113–134.
M. Marazakis, D. Papadakis, and C. Nikolaou, “The Aurora architecture for developing network-centric applications by dynamic composition of services,” Technical Report TR97-0213, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology, Heraklion, Greece, Dec. 1997. Available from http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/marazakis97aurora.html, accessed on 25 May 2001.
S.P. Marsh, “Formalising trust as a computational concept,” PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland, 1994.
A.C. Myers and B. Liskov, “A decentralized model for information flow control,” in Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Saint Malo, France, 1997, ACM Press: New York, pp. 129–142.
W. Nagy, F. Curbera, and S. Weerawarana, “The advertisement and discovery of services (ADS) protocol for Web services,” Oct. 2000. Available from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ ws-ads.html?dwzone=ws, accessed on 13 Aug. 2001.
A. Parasuraman, V.A. Zeithaml, and L.L. Berry, “SERVQUAL:Amultiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality,” Journal of Retailing, vol. 64, no.1, pp. 12–40, 1988.
J.L.A. Peiro, N. Asokan, M. Steiner, and M. Waidner, “Designing a generic payment service,” IBM Systems Journal, vol. 37, no.1, pp. 72–88, 1998.
C. Peltz, “Interacting with services on the web: A review of emerging technologies and standards for e-services,” Technical report, Hewlett Packard, March 2001. Available from http://devresource. hp.com/devresource/Docs/TechPapers/Eservices/e-services1.pdf, accessed on 08 May 2001.
D. Pfoser and C.S. Jensen, “Capturing the uncertainty of moving-object representations,” Technical Report CC-99-2, Chorochronos, Athens, Greece, April 1999. Available from http://www.dbnet.ntua.gr/~ nchoros/TRs/99/2/report.ps.gz, accessed on 05 June 2001.
G. Piccinelli and L. Mokrushin, “Dynamic service aggregation in electronic marketplaces,” Technical Report Number 31, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol, England, Feb. 2001. Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-31.html, accessed on 04 April 2001.
R.T. Rust and R.L. Oliver (Eds.), Service Quality: New Directions in Theory and Practice, Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA, USA, 1994.
A. Sahai, V. Machiraju, and K. Wurster, “Managing next generation E-services,” Technical Report HPL-2000-120, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, USA, Sept. 2000. Available from http://www. hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-120.html, accessed on 27 Dec. 2000.
S. Saltenis, C.S. Jensen, S.T. Leutenegger, and M.A. Lopez, “Indexing the positions of continuously moving objects,” Technical Report TR-44, TimeCenter, Denmark, Nov. 1999. Available from http://www. cs.auc.dk/research/DP/tdb/TimeCenter/TimeCenterPublications/TR-44.ps.gz, accessed on 05 June 2001.
T.W. Sandholm and V.R. Lesser, “Advantages of a leveled commitment contracting protocol,” in Proceedings of the 13th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), vol. 1, Portland, OR, USA, 1996, AAAI Press, pp. 126–133.
H. Schuster, D. Georgakopoulos, A. Cichocki, and D. Baker, “Modeling and composing service-based and reference process-based multi-enterprise processes,” in B. Wangler and L. Bergman (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'00), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Stockholm, Sweden, 2000, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, pp. 247–263.
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), “Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications Web Site, 2001,” Available from http://www.swift.com/, accessed on 08 May 2001.
S. Thatte, “XLANG: Web services for business process design,” Web site, Microsoft Corporation, Seattle, Washington, USA, Jan. 2001. Available from http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/ xml wsspecs/xlang-c/default.htm, accessed on 22 Jan. 2002.
Y. Theodoridis, T.K. Sellis, A. Papadopoulos, and Y. Manolopoulos, “Specifications for efficient indexing in spatiotemporal databases,” in M. Rafanelli and M. Jarke (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Scientific and Statistic Database Management (SSDBM'98), Capri, Italy, 1998, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 123–132.
D. Trastour, C. Bartolini, and J. Gonzalez-Castillo, “A semantic web approach to service description for matchmaking of services,” Technical Report Number 183, Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, England, July 2001. Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-183.html, accessed on 22 Aug. 2001.
W3C Web Services Team, “Position papers for the world wide web consortium (W3C) workshop on web services,” Technical Number HPL-2001-73, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, USA, April 2001. Available from http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-73.html, accessed on 21 May 2001.
J. Yang, W.-J. van den Heuvel, and M.P. Papazoglou, “Service deployment for virtual enterprises,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Information Technology for Virtual Enterprises (ITVE 2001), Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 2001, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 107–115.
G. Zacharia, A. Moukas, and P. Maes, “Collaborative reputation mechanisms in electronic marketplaces,” in Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-99)-Electronic Commerce Minitrack, Maui, Hawaii, USA, 1999, IEEE Computer Society.
V.A. Zeithaml and M.J. Bitner, Services Marketing, McGraw Hill: New York, USA, 1996.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
O'Sullivan, J., Edmond, D. & ter Hofstede, A. What's in a Service?. Distributed and Parallel Databases 12, 117–133 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016547000822
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016547000822