I am working on the development of a descriptive framework that is usable for all services, including electronic and business services. Electronic services can be described (however imperfectly) using the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). while not perfect, WSDL does have the advantage of being widely adopted for SOAP-based web services. When carefully assembled, web services can be chained together into an executable workflow to perform some useful task.

There no analogous way to assemble a workflow from business services.  While a business process can be described using BPMN, there is no way to automatically screen business service providers to determine whether they are suitable for performing a particular task within a given workflow. What is lacking is a WSDL for business services.

We need a machine-processable description of the services offered by a business. This description should include the tasks performed by the service (i.g., its effects), the inputs required to engage the service, the outputs that will be produced by the service, and any preconditions that must be satisfied before engaging the service. To the maximum extent practical, this description should be compatible with existing WSDLs — there is no logical reason electronic services cannot be combined with other services to form a complete workflow, so the descriptions of both services types should be compatible.

I’ve spent some time lately working on just such a service description, and over the weekend I turned my notes into a detailed class model that I exported into an XML schema. Next i need to do a detailed comparison with the WSDL schema to ensure I have accounted for all elements of the WSDL. After making any necessary refinements I will try some practical applications to see how it handles.

As best I can determine, nothing of this type has been developed to date. I had planned to call it a “Business Service Definition Language,” but I discovered that name was already taken by several researchers from the University of Wollongong who have published an interesting paper on the subject. Luckily for me, their research is in a different direction from mine even though they arrived at the same terminology. Universal Service Description Language is already taken. I considered General or Generic Service Description Language, but those seem too… generic.

So for now, it’s back to thinking of an appropriate name for my creation.

I met with my advisor last Thursday to discuss refinements to my research topic. During our previous meeting, he had tossed out the topic of “service science” along with a couple of papers from an issue of the IBM Systems Journal devoted to the topic. That threw a bit of a monkey wrench into my plan, as this was all new to me; in all of my research on web service composition I had not heard of this.

The good news is that after reading some of the articles and doing additional research into the topic, “service science” as used by the authors of the articles in the IBM Systems Journal is different from what I have been looking into. Those authors, along with other practitioners such as Services Science Global, Service Science, and the Service Research and Innovation Institute (among others) use service science in a way that refers to improving how service-based businesses improve their offerings. The best analogy that I can draw is to the industrial process improvements pioneered by W. Edwards Deming. Service science, in this context, refers to the study of how businesses measure the effectiveness and efficiency of services they provide to their customers. At least as of now, this does not seem to encompass the study of how to define their service offerings in a way that facilitates the composition of sservices from different providers.

All of which leads me to the output of this latest meeting, which was very productive. My advisor generally liked what I had put together as a way forward; now I need to refine it a little more and get buy-in from my committee. He also mentioned that we need to look for some more opportunities to publish on this topic. The good news is that there is very little in the services science arena that deals with my topic, so this should be a rich field to mine.

Skype is a wonderful tool. I used to use it to keep in touch with a buddy who was stationed in Japan, and it was amazing. On Thursday I used it to meet with my advisor to discuss refinements to my research. It worked out very well, as my schedule was being whipsawed by a proposal I’m working on at the office. And sitting at my kitchen table certainly beat having to drive home from Fairfax during rush hour.

An even better part of the meeting is that my advisor seemed pleased with my ideas on moving forward. We refined them a little, and now I have to get them arranged into a logical story that we can present to my committee. I have to get it done this weekend to we can meet again next week.

Thankfully, the proposal is almost over, so I might get a chance to finish up this research refinement in the coming week.

Per the instructions from my committee at my proposal defense, I have been working to narrow and focus my topic. While I initially expected that to be relatively easy, I haven’t made a whole lot of progress to date. Working 12+ hour days on a proposal at work hasn’t made it any easier.

I met with my advisor just over a week ago, and it seems my exercise in narrowing has morphed into something of an expansion. Clearly, the least-researched area within my proposed topic is the generation and assignment of semantic metadata to services interfaces such as WSDLs. Almost all the work on semantic description has assumed manual metadata generation.

On the direction of my advisor, I am taking this small area (generating and assigning semantic metadata to WSDLs with sufficient detail to compose web services into executable processes) and generalizing it to address any type of service. By “any type of service” I mean quite literallyany type of service: web services, doctors’ services, shipping services, anything at all.

So I’ve been working on capturing 10 or so questions that cover that area. I’ve almost got enough to send to my advisor. Hopefully I’ll be done and have a draft to him tomorrow.