Linked USDL: A Vocabulary for Web-Scale Service Trading

Abstract

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.

Semantic Web Service Search: A Brief Survey

“…Prominent languages and formats for semantic service description are OWL-S (Web Ontology Language for Web Services) [45], WSML (Web Service Modeling Language) [13], the W3C standard SAWSDL (Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema) [12], USDL (Unified Service Description Language) [36,48], Linked USDL [49], as well as the microformats hRESTS [37], SA-REST [16], and MicroWSMO. These description models mainly differ in their formal logic-based foundation and the possible extent of service annotation [26,50].…”

WSMO-Lite and hRESTS: Lightweight semantic annotations for Web services and RESTful APIs

“…[62] proposed a mechanism to annotate WSDL services with USDL descriptions. More recently, [63] proposed a comprehensive vocabulary for capturing and sharing USDL service based on Linked Data principles. Despite these attempts, to our knowledge, USDL has not been used to comprehensively reconcile the WS- * and RESTful worlds.…”

Linked USDL Agreement: Effectively Sharing Semantic Service Level Agreements on the Web

“…Despite the importance of services in developed economies and the widespread adoption of world-wide electronic commerce over the Web, most service trading is still essentially carried out via traditional and, often, manual means [1]. Searching for services, understanding their characteristics, or customizing a contract with service level guarantee are all activities generally carried out manually.…”

“…Thus far, however, Linked USDL provides no coverage for capturing agreement contracts between the parties engaged in a service transaction. Among these agreements, most relevant are service-level agreements (SLA) which define the level of a service (e.g., service reliability and availability) and corresponding actions in case of noncompliance such as compensations and liability issues (an example of a traditional paper SLA contract can be found here 1 ). In this paper we present Linked USDL Agreement, an extension to the Linked USDL family of ontologies, which provides domain independent means for capturing SLAs.…”

“…The vision towards a Web of services that would provide an economic fabric to complement existing brick and mortar services has led to the creation of conceptual models, and prototypes (see, e 3 Service [2], USDL [3], Linked USDL [1], and cloud computing management [4]). These contributions provide important building blocks in order to support the trading of services over the Web in an open, scalable, and automated manner.…”