Experience report on real-world manual service modeling in USDL

Abstract

The Internet of Services promotes distributable, composable and tradeable services as first-class entities. Such services are assumed to encompass the full range from technical Web services to conventional business services delivered by humans. However, research and development of service models and platforms to realize the Internet of Services vision has largely been concentrating on pure technical services. With the introduction of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL), this is about to change. In a multiple-enterprise evaluation study performed in parallel to the ongoing USDL specification process, we have applied modeling and registration techniques to existing services with none or few technical components provided by businesses in a locality-constrained area with the purpose of determining suitability and acceptance aspects. We outline the results of our study and include an evaluation of USDL language facilities in the context of real-world service representation. This chapter connects evaluation results with early USDL drafts [16] with a discussion on recent USDL capability changes up to the specification milestone M5.