Paper 5
Contractual Speci cations of Business Services: Modeling, Formalization and ProximityAuthors: Lam-Son Le, Trung-Viet Nguyen, Thai-Minh Truong, and Khuong Nguyen-An |
AbstractBusiness services arguably play a central role in service-based information systems as they would ll in the gap between the technicality of Service-Oriented Architecture and the business aspects captured in Enterprise Architecture. Business services have distinctive features that are not typically observed in Web services, e.g., significant portions of the functionality of business services might be executed in a human mediated fashion. The representation of business services requires that we view human activity and human-mediated functionality through the lens of computing and systems engineering. Contractually specifying a business service is crucial for the design and operationalization of business services from the service providers’ point of view. In this article, we present an overarching modeling and formalization approach to the contractual specifications of business services. First, business services are conceptually described from three different perspectives, giving rise to a list of service descriptors that matter most for the contractual specifications of services. Second, we formalize the service descriptors. Third, we devise a formal machinery to (a) verify if a group of services contractually match the specification of the bulkier service in question; (b) to assess the contractual proximity of service groups relative to a contractual service specification to help decide which combination of services from a catalog best realize the desired functionality. |