Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science

Most of the efforts conducted on services nowadays are focusing on aspects related to data and control flow, often disregarding the main goal of the future Internet of services, namely to allow the smooth interaction of people and computers with services in the actual world. Our main claim is that it is crucial, to achieve such goal, to build a global service framework able to account for complex processes involving people and computers, which however have always people at their ends. That's why in this paper we mostly emphasize the role of social and business-oriented services, whose consideration is needed to evaluate the global quality of e-services in relation to their ultimate social benefits, taking the overall impact on the organizational structure into account. Along these lines, the contribution of this proposal is a first concrete step towards a unified, rigorous and principled ontology centred on the notion of service availability, which results in useful distinctions between service, service content, service delivery and service process. Services are modelled by means of a layered set of interrelated events, with their own participants as well as temporal and spatial locations.