Ontologies for Model-Driven Service Engineering

Abstract

In Chapter II we discussed the fundamental properties and concepts of a service. Concepts like interface, contract, service provider and service consumer are universal (i.e., they apply to all types of services). However, in as much as they are intuitive and universal, service concepts such as the aforementioned lack widely agreed upon semantics. The term semantics is used by disciplines such as philosophy, mathematics, and computer science to refer to “the meaning of things.” Meaning is usually attributed to a concept via its association with other concepts. In everyday speech, defining, for example, a “car” to be a kind of a “vehicle” is an attempt to attribute meaning to “car” by associating it with another, more abstract concept called “vehicle.” If the recipient of this definition already understands the concept of a vehicle, then he/she can also understand the concept of car via its association with the more abstract/generic concept vehicle.