Fact-Based Web Service Ontologies

The service-oriented architecture paradigm has gained attention in the past years, because it promised to lay the foundation for agility, in the sense that it would enable companies to deliver new and more flexible business processes to improve customer satisfaction [1, 2, 3]. In the service-oriented architecture (soa) paradigm, a service requesting organization (sro) basically outsources one or more organizational activities or even complete business processes to one or more service delivering organizations (sdos). The way this is done in a traditional way, is that the sro ‘outsources’ a given business service to a ‘third-party’ sdo for a relative long period of time (3 months, a year). In an agile environment, the reconfigurable resources might face a life-span of a few days or even a few hours, in principle reconfiguration of business services can take place on a run-time time-scale, in the sense that for each new transaction a possibly different sdo must be configured into the value chain. The application of the service-oriented paradigm, therefore, allows the dynamic composition of business functionality by using the world-wide web [3, 4].