A unified description language for human to automated services

Through the rise of cloud computing, on-demand applications, and business networks, services are increasingly being exposed and delivered on the Internet and through mobile communications. So far, services have mainly been described through technical interface descriptions. The description of business details, such as pricing, service-level, or licensing, has been neglected and is therefore hard to automatically process by service consumers. Also, third-party intermediaries, such as brokers, cloud providers, or channel partners, are interested in the business details in order to extend services and their delivery and, thus, further monetize services. In this paper, the constructivist design of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL), aimed at describing services across the human-to-automation continuum, is presented. The proposal of USDL follows well-defined requirements which are expressed against a common service discourse and synthesized from currently available service description efforts. USDL's concepts and modules are evaluated for their support of the different requirements and use cases. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.