Abstract. Real-world services ranging from cloud solutions to consulting currently dominate economic activity. Yet, despite the increasing number of service marketplaces online, service trading on the Web remains highly restricted. Services are at best traded within closed silos that offer mainly manual search and comparison capabilities through a Web storefront. Thus, it is seldom possible to automate the customisation, bundling, and trading of services, which would foster a more efficient and effective service sector. In this paper we present Linked USDL, 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.

This article describe the use of dedicated ontology for teaching in the context of the L 3 project, a national joint project for deploying further vocational education in Germany. The requirements for the open L 3 learning infrastructure are presented in order to motivate our approach to metamodeling learning resources and services by using dedicated ontolgies of pedagogics and didactics. The basic concepts and parts of the pedagogical ontology are outlined, and the practical implications for several of today's problems such as authoring and design, retrieval and adaptive of training resources are illustrated. An overview of the L 3 runtime architecture shows how the didactical ontology is used to deliver adaptive learning.

This article provides the foundations for the new field of research coined Service Networks research.Understanding what factors explain the structure and dynamics of global service networks may lead to a more efficient and balanced society and economy. The concept of service network is formally represented as a business structure made up of services systems which are nodes connected by one or more specific types of relationships. They can be used to represent the global economy, i.e. a complex network composed of national economies, which are themselves networks of markets, and markets are also networks of providers, brokers, intermediaries, and consumers. The authors' key challenge consists in developing a novel perspective on socio-economic dynamics by connecting service models representing service systems (e.g. consulting, governmental, and educational services). Theories to be developed will enable to understand, describe, explain, analyze, predict, and control the evolution of global service networks..

Distributed multimedia applications recently gain a large attraction to the multimedia industry. The MHEG (Multimedia Hypermedia Expert Group) is developing an open international standard for the exchange of multimedia presentations and their work has become quite advanced now. This paper describes the MHEG standard and its implementation in the GLASS project and presents an open authoring environment for distributed multimedia applications in the MHEG context. Our GLASS-Studio is an authoring environment employing the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technique. The environment provides abstractions from the authoring domain and the underlying technical infrastructure of the GLASS system. GLASS-Studio supports rapid-prototyping and simulation capabilities, enabling an incremental and iterative design process. Real-world metaphors like direct manipulation and dragadrop provide an easy-to-learn user inter3ace. We present a flexible cooperation scheme based on the blackboard metaphor and show how guidance and assistance for the author can be incorporated. Finally we give an overview of the implementation concepts of GLASS-Studio.

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