Internet of Services
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This article is written like a personal reflection or opinion essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. (May 2010) |
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It has been suggested that this article be merged with Internet Services. (Discuss) Proposed since July 2010. |
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It has been suggested that this article be merged with Web Service. (Discuss) Proposed since July 2010. |
Internet of Services is an Internet application where classical barriers and inefficiencies to service access are removed.
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Situation [edit]
Over the last decade, the service sector has become the biggest and fastest-growing business sector in the world. For the first time ever, it now employs most people worldwide. In order for this growth to continue, services should become more widely and easily available and should also yield higher productivity. The clever use of information technology can significantly help to achieve these goals. Various companies and research institutes have started to explore different aspects of the service sector to determine which services can be managed through IT and, being combined, lend themselves into value-added services. This new and elaborate vision for next-generation services provided via the Internet is known as the Internet of Services.
Challenges [edit]
As open service partnerships and service ecosystems have quickly grown, their limitations are clear. The mechanisms for consolidating service delivery are one-off and cannot be reused without large overheads. They result in oligarchies, limiting further service growth to narrow governance and proprietary platforms.
Approach and its Benefits [edit]
Through the Internet of Services, it is envisaged that these barriers will be removed giving way to a level “playing field” for service supply and access. Beyond ordering books, querying maps, booking flights and the like, commoditized business transactions from mainstream industries are set to take off as the next wave of consumable services. Examples such as property conveyance, business formation and life events (e.g. births and marriage) entail complex integration challenges. They are long-running and implemented through legacy applications hosted by providers. Access to these services requires interactions with backend applications, and several agencies and therefore applications may be involved. Navigation of such services therefore needs to be as seamless for consumers as linking to pages, facilitated by semantic descriptions of services and their interactions. At the same time, business processes, not just individuals, are expected to be consumers of “cloud” services. When harnessed through business processes, services such as environment sensors and decision-support (data mashups) streamline otherwise “out-of-band” operations like exception handling. They draw businesses processes out of internal stovepipes and rigid B2B interactions, into “real-world” awareness and agility. Ultimately they are rendering tomorrow’s dynamic collaboration and future value networks, as anticipated by service industries and the research community.
Roles in Global Service Delivery [edit]
• Service Gateway: making services available
• Service Aggregator: composing services into value added services
• Service Broker: Brokering and billing of value-added services
• Service Channel: Delivery of value-added services using customer specific channels
IoS Technologies [edit]
USDL (Unified Service Description Language)
unifying approach for the description of generic (business) services that captures and aligns business, operational and technical characteristics.
SDF (Service Delivery Framework)
A Framework, which makes services tradable on the internet, composable into value-added services, and allows the integration of customized services into the environment of service consumers.
References [edit]
- Cardoso, Jorge, Barros, Alistair, May, Norman and Kylau, Uwe, Towards a Unified Service Description Language for the Internet of Services: Requirements and First Developments, IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010.
- Jorge Cardoso, K Voigt, M Winkler, Service Engineering for the Internet of Services, Enterprise Information Systems, LNBIP, Vol.19, pp. 15–27, ISSN:1865-1348, Springer, 2009.
- Lutz Heuser, Claudia Alsdorf, Dan Woods: The Web-Based Service Industry Infrastructure for Enterprise SOA 2.0, Potential Killer Applications - Semantic Service Discovery, International Research Forum 2008
- Alistair Barros, Marlon Dumas and Peter Bruza: The Move to Web Service Ecosystems, BPTrends, November 2005
- Winkler, Matthias, Cardoso, Jorge and Scheithauer, Gregor, Challenges of Business Service Monitoring, Tenth International Conference on Information Integration and Web Based Applications & Services (iiWAS), ACM and Austrian Computer Society, 2008.
- Kett, Holger, Voigt, Konrad, Scheithauer, Gregor and Cardoso, Jorge, Service Engineering in Business Ecosystems, Proceedings of the XVIII International RESER Conference, (Eds) Ganz, W. and Kicherer, F. and Schletz, A., Fraunhofer IRB, pp. 1–22, 2008.
- Cardoso, Jorge, Service Engineering for Future Business Value Networks, Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2008), (Eds) Cordeiro, José and Filipe, Joaquim, Vol. AIDSS, pp. 15–20, ISBN 978-989-8111-37-1, 2008.
