An Ontological Approach for Eliciting and Understanding Needs in e-Services

Abstract

The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within eservice initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe customer needs, and the necessary e-services that satisfy such needs, and (2) to bundle elementary e-services into needs-satisfying e-service bundles. The ontology as well as the associated reasoning mechanisms are codified in RDFS to enable software support for need elicitation and service bundling. A case study from the Norwegian energy sector is used to demonstrate how we put our theory into practice. This work has been partially supported by the European Commission, as project No. IST-2001-33144 OBELIX (Ontology-Based ELectronic Integration of compleX products and value chains) and by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, as the FrUX project (Freeband User eXperience).

Aligning goals and services through goal and business modelling

“…Lately, both in the research and the industrial communities, it has been recognized that a vital fact about e-services is the business functionality they are offering (Frankel 2007;Cherbakov et al 2005;Baida et al 2005). This fact is shifting the focus of large-scale e-service design to the context of economic value transfers.…”

“…In Baida et al (2005), the authors propose an ontologically founded method for describing customer needs, which uses a goal decomposition technique, mapped to available resources that are to be provisioned by services. However, the approach does not relate services to a business model, and its focus is solely on the customer perspective, that is, the goals of customers.…”

Goal Oriented Value Object Classification for Healthcare Service Development

“…When representing business environment in value modeling, several methodologies have been proposed by the researchers in order to simplify and to facilitate the process of business solutions development [8], [1], [9], [13]. Recent research works [2], [11] on designing e-Business systems are trying to ensure business-IT alignment by proposing systematic approaches to capture higher level motivational requirements and realizing them on subsequent modeling level of development workflows. Often business models describe what aspects of the organization by focusing on what value is exchanged among actors [11].…”

An MDA Method for Service Modeling by Formalizing REA and Open-edi Business Frameworks with SBVR

“…Lately, research in both academic and industrial communities have implied that when designing service-oriented software solutions, the starting point should be the business models of enterprises [10], [11], [12] and [13]. This fact, according to the referred studies, is shifting the focus of large scale e-service design to the context of economic resource transfers.…”