Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science

Most of the efforts conducted on services nowadays are focusing on aspects related to data and control flow, often disregarding the main goal of the future

Internet of services

, namely to allow the smooth interaction of people and computers with services in the actual world. Our main claim is that it is crucial, to achieve such goal, to build a

global

service framework able to account for complex processes involving people and computers, which however have always

people

at their ends. That’s why in this paper we mostly emphasize the role of

social

and

business-oriented

services, whose consideration is needed to evaluate the global quality of e-services in relation to their ultimate social benefits, taking the overall impact on the organizational structure into account. Along these lines, the contribution of this proposal is a first concrete step towards a unified, rigorous and principled ontology centred on the notion of

service availability,

which results in useful distinctions between

service, service content, service delivery

and

service process.

Services are modelled by means of a layered set of interrelated events, with their own participants as well as temporal and spatial locations.