The internet of services and USDL

A prominent research focus, especially in the context of EU public funding, has been the systematic use of the Internet for new ways of value creation in the services sector. This idea of service networks in the Internet, frequently dubbed the Internet of Services or Web service ecosystems, wants to make services tradable in digital media. In order to enable communication and trade between providers and consumers of services, the Internet of Services requires a standard that creates a "commercial envelope" around a service. This is where the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) comes into play as a normative and balanced unification of service information. The unified description established by USDL is machine-processable, considers technical and business aspects of a service as well as functional and non-functional attributes.

Enabling USDL by tools

Fundamental tooling is required in order to apply USDL in practical settings. This chapter discusses three fundamental types of tools for USDL. First, USDL editors have been developed for expert and casual users, respectively. Second, several USDL repositories have been built to allow editors accessing and storing USDL descriptions. Third, our generic USDL marketplace allows providers to describe their services once and potentially trade them anywhere. In addition, the iosyncrasies of service trading as opposed to the simpler case of product trading. The chapter also presents several deployment scenarios of such tools to foster individual value chains and support new business models across organizational boundaries. We close the chapter with an application of USDL in the context of service engineering.

SOA approaches

As the service-oriented architecture paradigm has become ever more popular, different standardization efforts have been proposed by various consortia to enable interaction among heterongeneous environments through this paradigm. This chapter will overview the most prevalent of these SOA approaches. It will first show how technical services can be described, how they can interact with each other and be discovered by users. Next, the chapter will present different standards to facilitate service composition and to design service-oriented environments in light of a universal understanding of service orientation. The chapter will conclude with a summary and a discussion on the limitations of the reviewed standards along their ability to describe service properties. This paves the way to the next chapters where the USDL standard will be presented, which aims to lift such limitations.

Design overview of USDL

Enabling web-based service networks and ecosystems requires a way of describing services by a "commercial envelope" as discussed in Chapter 1. A uniform conception of services across all walks of life (including technical services) is required capturing business, operational and technical aspects. Therefore, our proposed Unified Service Description Language (USDL) particularly draws from and generalizes the best-of-breed approaches presented in Part I. The following chapter presents the design rationale of USDL where the different aspects are put in a framework of descriptions requirements. This is followed by the subsequent chapters of this part that provide details on specific aspects such as pricing or legal issues.

The Industry Commission inquiry into charitable organisations : the draft report implications for the future of community services

In December 1993, the Commonwealth Assistant Treasurer., Mr George Gear announced an Inquiry into Charitable Organisations in Australia. The inquiry would be undertaken by the Industry Commission, the structure charged by the Commonwealth to oversight its micro-economic reform agenda. The inquiry had been on the Industry Commission's forward workplan since 1992. In July 1993 a draft terms of reference was prepared for comment by the State Premiers...

Nonprofit organisations face a restructuring state : the case of local social services in the Hunter region of New South Wales

This paper is concerned with certain of the characteristics of local social services, and their role in a restructuring Australian welfare state. I am particularly concerned with the distinctive gender characteristics of these organisations, because in comparison with most other organisations they have a feminised quality. This partly mirrors women's traditional role of undertaking the major part of the caring labour of society. However, simultaneously work in these organisation deviates from more traditional patterns where employed women occupy subordinate positions. In many community organisations, women occupy leadership roles. The analysis here is concerned with the apparently paradoxical nature of these organisations in their capacity to entrench traditional gender roles and to challenge these by allowing women to fill management positions. It is also concerned to examine whether changes that have been occurring in the community services sector over the last two decades are likely to enhance women's general position in the society, or diminish the power exercised by women. The paper draws in a preliminary way on a study of local services in the Hunter Region of NSW undertaken in the latter half of 1992. These preliminary findings are set against the broader picture of developments in the contemporary welfare state.

Pandemic (H1N1) Influenza 2009 and Australian emergency departments : implications for policy, practice and pandemic preparedness

Objective: To describe the reported impact of Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 on EDs, so as to inform future pandemic policy, planning and response management. Methods: This study comprised an issue and theme analysis of publicly accessible literature, data from jurisdictional health departments, and data obtained from two electronic surveys of ED directors and ED staff. The issues identified formed the basis of policy analysis and evaluation. Results: Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 had a significant impact on EDs with presentation for patients with ‘influenza-like illness’ up to three times that of the same time in previous years. Staff reported a range of issues, including poor awareness of pandemic plans, patient and family aggression, chaotic information flow to themselves and the public, heightened stress related to increased workloads and lower levels of staffing due to illness, family care duties and redeployment of staff to flu clinics. Staff identified considerable discomfort associated with prolonged times wearing personal protective equipment. Staff believed that the care of non-flu patients was compromised during the pandemic as a result of overwork, distraction from core business and the difficulties associated with accommodating infectious patients in an environment that was not conducive. Conclusions: This paper describes the breadth of the impact of pandemics on ED operations. It identifies a need to address a range of industrial, management and procedural issues. In particular, there is a need for a single authoritative source of information, the re-engineering of EDs to accommodate infectious patients and organizational changes to enable rapid deployment of alternative sources of care.

The "free-factor" impact on value in health services

Purpose - This paper seeks to understand the impact of financial cost on customer value in health prevention services by comparing free government services with private fee-charging providers. This is important as there is a common belief that a free health service is of lower quality and thus lower value than a paid service. However there is no evidence to verify this notion. Design / Methodology / Approach - A large-scale online survey was administered nationwide to Australian women. The respondents were asked about the functional and emotional value derived from their service experiences. Findings - Structural equation modelling (SEM) revealed non significant relationships between fee/free services and functional and emotional value (FV/EV). The non-significant relationship with FV is contrary to the theory of price quality relationship in services. This could be attributed to consumer perceptions that the technical quality of health professionals is comparable across free and paid services. The non-significant relationship with EV could be explained by the indicators used to reflect EV. These indicators were reflective of breast screening behaviour, not breast screening services. Subsequently, it may be posited that the act of having a breast screen is sufficient for consumers to derive emotional value, regardless of the financial cost. Originality / Value - This research fills an important gap in the literature by investigating the impact of financial cost on a service that consumers use proactively(prevention), rather than reactively (treatment). Insights are provided into the impact of cost on customer value in preventive health services, which are valuable to social marketing academics, health practitioners, and governments

Interactive product browsing and configuration using remote augmented reality sales services

Real-time remote sales assistance is an underdeveloped component of online sales services. Solutions involving web page text chat, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with configurations of physically complex artefacts. Recently, there has been great interest in the application of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments for remote sales of physical artefacts. However, there is a lack of analysis and development of appropriate software services to support these processes. We extend our previous work with the detailed design of configuration context services to support the management of an interactive sales session using augmented reality. We detail the context and configuration services required, presenting a novel data service streaming configuration information to the vendor for business analytics. We expect that a fully implemented configuration management service, based on our design, will improve the remote sales experience for both customers and vendors alike via analysis of the streamed information.