Reasoning about substitute choices and preference ordering in e-services

e-Services are just like normal services, but can be ordered and provisioned via the Internet completely. Increasingly, these e-services are offered as a multi-supplier bundle of elementary services. How to automatically compose and prioritize these multi-supplier e-service bundles is considered as a key problem. In this paper, we present the e(3) service ontology to represent a multi-supplier e-service catalogue from a consumer need perspective. Then, we use this ontology to reason about alternative e-service bundles satisfying a particular need, and to prioritize the found bundles using the consumer benefits they provide. The ontology and the reasoning process are illustrated by a case study in the Dutch telecommunication industry.