Linked USDL is a comprehensive vocabulary for capturing and sharing rich service descriptions, which aims to support the trading of services over the Web in an open, scalable, and highly automated manner. The vocabulary adopts and exploits Linked Data as a means to efficiently support communication over the Web, to promote and simplify its adoption by reusing vocabularies and datasets, and to enable the opportunistic engagement of multiple cross-domain providers.

1. A Vocabulary for Web-scale Service Trading
Carlos Pedrinaci, KMi - The Open University!
Jorge Cardoso, University of Coimbra!
Torsten Leidig, SAP

2. – Christian Grönroos
“Services are [economic] activities of an intangible
nature […] which are provided as solutions to
customer problems”

4. Services dominate the economic
activity of developed countries

6. Services
- Finding!
- Comparing!
- Bundling!
- Trading !
- Consuming
… are largely manual activities that in the
best case only take place within silos

7. What offerings are available for me if I want
- Broadband!
- Landline !
- Mobile phone!
- Movies on demand
What are their characteristics?!
Which one(s) is(are) best for me?

8. Describing Services
❖ Most earlier work concerned
with technical concerns only:
WSDL, OWL-S, etc!
❖ Business centric approaches:!
❖ Focussed on products !
❖ Tackled subsets of the
domain!
❖ Failed to support sharing
and processing service
descriptions over the Web

9. USDL
❖ Most comprehensive
specification for service
description!
❖ Led by SAP!
❖ Modelled in eCore!
❖ 9 modules with +125 classes!
❖ Failed to gain adoption due to
complexity, difficulties for
sharing and extending the
model

10. Linked USDL
❖ A new vocabulary informed by USDL!
❖ Open!
❖ Support the engagement of any business entity across
domains may it be for trading, brokering, bundling …!
❖ Web-based!
❖ Highly interoperable solution on a world-wide scale!
❖ Promote take up!
❖ Simplicity of adoption will drive take up

11. Design Principles
❖ Linked Data!
❖ Uniform representation, communication!
❖ Global identifiers!
❖ Interlinking (services, business entities, interfaces)!
❖ Semantics!
❖ Support automated reasoning but retain simplicity!
❖ Extensions!
❖ Reuse

12. Methodology
❖ Requirements Analysis!
❖ Identification of main topics and concepts to cover!
❖ Search for reusable and popular vocabularies!
❖ Reuse and modelling!
❖ Evaluation

13. Service Dimensions
❖ Functionality!
❖ Agents and Networks!
❖ Service Relationships!
❖ Operational and Delivery!
❖ Consumption
➡ What it does and provides!
➡ Entities involved!
➡ Bundles, enhancements!
➡ Availability, legal issues!
➡ Communication channels

14. Vocabulary and Data Reuse

16. Coverage

17. Supporting Tools

18. In use…

19. Ongoing and Future Work
❖ Pricing Module (coming soon)!
❖ Support for dynamic pricing models!
❖ Agreements Module (coming soon)!
❖ Support for capturing and analysing agreements and
conditions behind service offerings!
❖ Tooling for automated bundling and comparison of
cross service provider offerings

20. Thanks for your attention
More information at:!
http://www.linked-usdl.org!
!
Vocabularies tools and libraries available at:!
https://github.com/linked-usdl