Preparation for Technical Discussion session on "Interoperability Concerns in the Growth of Service Sciences -- Ontological Implications of Service Oriented Architecture" - June 30, 2005    (DJD)

Interoperability Concerns in the Growth of Service Sciences -- Ontological Implications of SOA    (DKS)

Traditionally, trading partners -- both within and between firms – trafficked in bundled tangible products like consumer goods or partially assembled finished goods. Many early e-commerce standards assumed implicitly product-based exchanges.    (DKT)

Increasingly however, the growth in exchange and bundling of Services in the US and in other economies has supplanted tangible goods as the raison d’etre of international and domestic commerce. Estimates of the percentage of the gross domestic product of the US due to services (as opposed to goods) range as high as 80%. This trend has led to increased interest in services and the establishment of new research centers like the proposed "Center for Services Sciences" at U.C. Berkeley. A good of overview of such trends is the brief article by Henry Chesbrough:    (DKV)

         http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9b743b2a-0e0b-11d9-97d3-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=6f0b3526-07e3-11d9-9673-00000e2511c8.html    (DKW)

In e-commerce, this growth in service provision has been mirrored by the advent of Service-Oriented Architectures which support integration and creation of composite solutions (bundles of services) from loosely-coupled components assembled both within an enterprise (outputs from legacy applications) and outside of the enterprise (typically XML-based Web services).    (DKX)

Whether or not the integrated services originate from incompatible operations inside the firm or from incompatible vendor interfaces from outside the firms, semantic inconsistencies, redundancies, and discrepancies make the vision of integrated services an ontological problem. The purpose of this panel is to explore the ontological implications of service Sciences in general and of Service-Oriented Architectures in particular. We will start our Ontolog session with some general comments from notable practitioners in the SOA and ontology areas. We will then open up the discussion to more general comments and critiques.    (DKY)