What's in a Service?

A proper understanding of the general nature, potential and obligations of electronic services may be achieved by examining existing commercial services in detail. The everyday services that surround us, and the ways in which we engage with them, are the result of social and economic interaction that has taken place over a long period of time. If we attempt to provide electronic services, and do not take this history into account, then we will fail. Any attempt to provide automated electronic services that ignores this history will deny consumers the opportunity to negotiate and refine, over a large range of issues, the specific details of the actual service to be provided. To succeed, we require a rich and accurate means of representing services. An essential ingredient of service representation is capturing the non-functional properties of services. These include the methods of charging and payment, the channels by which the service is requested and provided, constraints on temporal and spatial availability, service quality, security, trust and the rights attached to a service. Not only are comprehensive descriptions essential for useful service discovery, they are also integral to service management, enabling service negotiation, composition, and substitution. This paper builds on an understanding of services and their interactions, to outline the non-functional properties of services and their uses.