=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3249/paper5-OSS
|storemode=property
|title=An Informational Perspective on the Ontology of Services (short paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3249/paper5-OSS.pdf
|volume=Vol-3249
|authors=Paul Fabry,François Goyer,Adrien Barton,Jean-Francois Ethier
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/FabryGBE22
}}
==An Informational Perspective on the Ontology of Services (short paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3249/paper5-OSS.pdf
An informational perspective on the ontology of services
Paul Fabry 1, François Goyer 2, Adrien Barton 1,2,3 and Jean-François Ethier 1,2
1
Groupe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Informatique de la Santé (GRIIS), Université de Sherbrooke, Quebec,
Canada
2
Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Informatique de la Santé de l’Université de Sherbrooke (CIRIUS),
Université de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
3
Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), CNRS, Université de Toulouse, France
Abstract
The notion of services, although intuitive and used in many domains, is difficult to define from
an ontological point of view. However, a formal representation of services would be
particularly relevant in the healthcare and social services domain to support domain ontology
alignment. In this article we draw on previous ontological work about services to propose an
adaptation focused on Basic Formal Ontology and ontologies from the biomedical domain. We
provide definitions and axioms following the OBO Foundry methodology with a focus on
informational entities. This ontological model is a first step towards a better integration of
existing domain ontologies in a healthcare services framework.
Keywords 1
information content entity, services ontology, healthcare
1 Introduction
Learning health systems (LHS) aim at improving concrete, significant problems in a health system
by using data generated by the system to identify challenges, propose novel solutions and then
facilitating the transfer of knowledge from research to care activities. To fulfill this goal, they rely on
the interoperability between data that are often distributed in many clinical information systems [15].
However, such information systems may not share the same semantic. To address this issue, applied
ontologies can provide a common, source-independent representation of clinical information [8]. With
this goal in mind, several ontologies have been developed for domains such as drug prescriptions [10]
or laboratory test results [4], as part of a distributed data access platform supporting LHS.
In a previous work, we proposed to represent the set of activities related to the improvement of
health status of an individual or population using two classes of planned processes, Health Procedure,
which are processes with an established objective of having a desirable impact on the health status, and
Health Activity which constitute the building blocks of health procedures but can also be carried out
independently of any health procedure [11]. Such classes allow us to represent health related processes
as applied to individuals. While some processes might be carried out at the initiative of an individual in
his or her home (e.g. measuring one’s weight), a large portion of processes currently generating health
data is instead originating from various stakeholders interacting together as part of the healthcare
system. There is therefore a need to clarify how these activities are related to the general environment
of healthcare and social services. To address this, we present here an ontological model of service that
can encompass health procedures to better represent the integration of health procedures into an
ontological framework for services.
In the following section we will review existing definitions (both terminological and ontological)
for “service”. We will then detail our proposal and the different classes needed to support this definition.
As part of our endeavour to support LHS data sharing, we develop ontologies describing the structure
The Eighth Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO’22), August 15-19, 2022, Jönköping University, Sweden
EMAIL: paul.fabry@usherbrooke.ca; adrien.barton@irit.fr; jf.ethier@usherbrooke.ca
ORCID: 0000-0002-3336-2476 (A. 1); 0000-0002-7626-1026 (A. 2); 0000-0001-5500-6539 (A. 3); 0000-0001-9408-0109 (A. 4)
©️ 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
of various clinical documents that are used to generate a relational database structure [16] that is then
mapped to databases from various healthcare institutions, in order to support a system of data mediation.
[9] Consequently, our work will focus primarily on informational entities that are generated during the
course of a service.
2 Existing representation of services
Even leaving aside its military or religious meanings, the term “service” is highly polysemous in
common language. For example, the Cambridge dictionary [21] offers several definitions of service,
among which: “work done, or help provided, esp. for the public or for a person or an organization” or
“a system, organization, or business that provides for a public need, or the operation of such a system”.
In addition, definitions of “service” are based on terms that are themselves rather ambiguous such as
“provider”, “consumer”, or “supplier”.
The term “service” is also extensively used in economics and a review of the literature on the use of
the term “service” by Edvardsson et al. [7] suggests considering a service as a perspective on value
creation from the customer point of view.
In the biomedical domain, several ontologies from the OBO Foundry [20] directly define service or
service-related classes, with overlapping definitions:
• NCIT [19] defines service as: “Work, or a product of that work, done by one person or group
that benefits another.”
• OBI [2] defines service as “A planned process in which a service provider performs a task
(i.e. a planned process) for a service consumer.”
OBI defines also two roles realized in a service:
• A service provider role: “is a role which inheres in a person or organization and is realized
in a planned process which provides access to training, materials or execution of protocols
for an organization or person”
• A service consumer role: “a role which inheres in a person who uses a service”
Not limited to the biomedical domain but also based on BFO, the Common Core Ontology proposes
a commercial exchange ontology [17]. However, while it defines the class commercial exchange as a
process, it does not directly define the term “service” but a class service provider as: “An Organization
whose purpose is to provide a service to other Agents.”
These definitions highlight the fact that, when used alone, “service” might refer to an outcome, the
actual process of producing an outcome or even the capability of providing an outcome. Some authors
[12] argue that the polysemy of the term “service” implies that one should not introduce a class service
(simpliciter), but rather a set of interrelated classes representing different aspects of the service domain.
Nardi et al. [18] details three phases of a service:
• service offer in which “services are publicized to target consumers”;
• service negotiation characterized by the “interaction between provider and customer in order
to establish an agreement”;
• service delivery which consists of the fulfilment of said agreement.
Ferrario and Guarino [12] identify five proper parts in a service: service commitment, service
presentation, service acquisition, service process and service value exchange. These analyses of service
have in common the notion that at the core of a service is a commitment that captures both the
obligations of the entity which offer the service and the one who demands it. These analyses of service
are based on different high-level ontologies, namely DOLCE [13] and UFO [14] and are not directly
transposable to our BFO-based ontologies. In addition, since our methodology consists in developing
ontologies describing the structure of various clinical documents that are used to generate a relational
database structure, we need to describe the various informational entities that are involved with a
service.
3 Methods
An important principle in ontology development is to ensure the univocity of terms, i.e. a term should
have the same meaning on every occasion of use [1]. The previous section highlights the difficulty of
attaining this for the term “service”. Therefore, rather than aiming to define a class service, which may
be semantically too broad to be relevant, we will discuss the main entities involved in services. We will
then introduce OWL classes and object properties to represent these entities.
These classes are built following a realist approach based on BFO. We will also emphasize the
relevant informational entities. In this respect we adhere to Smith and Ceusters’s definition of
information content entity (ICE) as a generically dependent continuant concretized by a quality that
inheres in an independent continuant and that is about something [6]. Of note, information content
entities can be concretized not only in a material support such as an ink pattern on a paper or a pixel
arrangement on a computer screen, but also in what the authors call “mental quality” which “specifically
depends on an anatomical structure in the cognitive system of an organism.” Thus, there is a continuity
between mental entities and information externalized for communication purpose.
In addition, we use the object property “directs” and its inverse properties “is directed by” [3]. This
property defines a relation of directedness between a directive information entity and a process.
In accordance with the OBO foundry principles, classes and properties from other ontologies are
reused as much as possible to maintain orthogonality between OBO ontologies. In addition, textual
definitions following an Aristotelian structure and important axioms are provided.
4 Results
Among the characteristics mentioned above, three aspects of services seem determinant to us and
will be described in more details below:
• An intersection between an offer and a request;
• A negotiated agreement;
• The execution of some processes.
4.1 An intersection between an offer and a request
Nardi et al. [18] consider that the starting point is the establishment of a service offering between a
service provider and a target community. From an informational entity point of view, we consider two
information content entities at this level, a “service offer” and a “request”
A service offer details the kind of processes a party is willing to fulfill, as well as the necessary
conditions (the expected compensation for example) for them to accept to attempt to realize these
processes. A menu in a restaurant for example. A service offer is an ICE that is about some type of
processes, and usually includes specifications intending to direct these processes.
A request describes one or several processes a party wants to see instantiated (whether for its own
benefit or that of another party). For example, what a customer will order in a restaurant, whether it is
on the menu or not. A request involves an aim at directing processes, but as it can also contain non-
directive information, such as the identification of the requester, we classify request as a subclass of
ICE, rather than a subclass of IAO:directive information entity.
There is no fixed sequential order of appearance established between the request and the service
offer: in some cases, the request may arise from the awareness of a service offer while in other cases,
the latter follows the request. We consider that not only the presence of these two entities is necessary
for services, but also that the request party and the service offer party are distinct. Indeed, in the common
use of the term “service”, what people do for themselves does not enter into the domain of service. For
example, I may initiate the request to have my lawn mowed. If I do it myself, the lawn mowing process
does not take place in a service context. However, if I hire a gardening company that presented me a
lawn mowing service offer, the lawn mowing process would then take place in a service context. While
an individual can satisfy his own requests, the service offer must originate from another party.
We propose the following Aristotelian definitions and axioms:
request=def. “An information content entity specifiying one or several types of processes that a party,
whether a person or an organization, wants to see instantiated for the benefit of itself or another party.”
service offer=def. “An information content entity describing the processes a person or an organization
is willing to perform, usually for a compensation.”
request subClassOf (has_part some directive information entity)
4.2 A negotiated agreement
We have identified two parties, which can be individuals or organizations, at the origin of services:
one expressing a request (request party) and the other proposing an offer (service offer party). In a
subsequent step, both parties interact to reach an agreement. After a certain number of back and forth,
if the negotiation is fruitful, the service offer party commits itself on a series of specifications to be
followed when fulfilling the processes and the request party accepts this commitment as satisfactory
and in turn commits itself to fulfill the required conditions for the realisation of these processes, such
as compensation or availability. Both commitments will constitute a service agreement. To note, service
agreements are social entities, and their descriptions in such an ontological framework is a complex
subject that goes beyond the scope of this article (see e.g. [5] for more discussion on socio-legal entities
in the context of BFO). Instead, we propose an informational perspective on this question. We introduce
the informational entity that specifies the social agreement: a “social agreement specification”.
These agreed specifications might differ from the initial service offer as they represent a compromise
acceptable to both parties. This is the archetypal case. In some cases, the negotiation is mostly an
exchange of commitments based on pre-existing service offers or other considerations. For example,
ordering from a fast-food should minimise the negotiation phase, otherwise the “fast” part of the
endeavour might not be met. Another important aspect is that a core participant to the service delivery
might not participate to the negotiation. For example, pediatric care with toddlers usually involves a
parent as a request party and a health organisation as a service offer party. The child him/herself is often
not part of the decision (vaccines being a contemporary example). A similar situation occurs in court
mandated mental-health hospitalisation where the request party is the court and the service offer party
is the health organisation.
We therefore define a service agreement negotiation process that takes as input a request and a
service offer and that aims to generate a service agreement through a negotiation between the parties
involved. This process will not always output a service agreement because it can fail if the parties do
not agree. In addition, this negotiation is limited in some cases to the acceptance of the terms of the
service offer party service by the request party.
We propose the following Aristotelian definitions and axioms:
service agreement negotiation=def. “A planned process of interaction between a request party and a
service offer party having as specified input some request and some service offer and that aims to
generate as output a service agreement.”
service agreement specification=def. “An information content entity that specifies a service
agreement made between a request party and a service offer party. A service agreement specification
can direct some processes that correspond to what has been agreed between the parties.”
service agreement negotiation subClassOf (has_specified_input some request)
service agreement negotiation subClassOf (has_specified_input some service offer)
4.3 The execution of some processes
The dimension that is arguably the most easily associated to services is the execution of processes,
resulting from an agreement, for the benefit of someone or a community. Nardi et al. [18] proposes to
differentiate these processes according to whether they are carried out by one, the other or both of the
parties involved, and includes them in a service delivery entity. The authors separate these processes
according to their participants by dividing them into two categories: customer and provider. We believe
that this distinction, although commonly used, may be incomplete for delimiting them. Therefore, we
prefer in a first step to identify a generic type of process, service delivery, that includes all service
specific processes performed by the parties involved. An important common factor in all these processes
is that they are detailed in the service agreement.
In BFO-oriented ontologies, we consider a service delivery as a subclass of OBI:planned process.
What distinguishes it from other planned processes is the fact that it is directed by a service agreement
specification. We propose the following Aristotelian definitions and axioms:
service delivery=def. A planned process that aims at fulfilling the commitments of a service
agreement.
service delivery subClassOf (is_directed_by some service agreement specification)
5 Discussion and conclusion
With this work we propose a representation of services related entities based on Nardi et al. seminal
work adapted for BFO ontologies with a perspective focused on informational entities. It is built around
a service negotiation process that takes as input a request and a service offer, and a service agreement
specification that is about a service agreement and directs some service delivery. This representation
allows us to integrate our previous work on health procedure into a more global healthcare service
framework. As a health procedure is a planned process, we can assume that it can also be a service
delivery if it is directed by a service agreement specification.
Yet, there are some points in the representation of services that have not been addressed here,
particularly concerning the processes’ participants and their roles. While it is usually established to
characterize services processes, participants or roles in terms of “provider” or “customer”, we consider
that these notions are not as clearly delimited as they seem and are even sometimes overlapping. Instead
of hiring a company to mow my lawn, I could participate in a service exchange with another person
who would come in exchange for piano lessons, for example. Moreover, it seems to us that roles evolve
between the different stages of the services. Indeed, the role born by the service offer party does not
seem to us to be necessarily the same as the one born by the participants in the resulting service process
from the service offer party. For example, the role worn by a restaurant as a whole differs from the roles
of the different people who work there, from washing dishes to accounting. This strikes us as especially
relevant in a healthcare context, where it seems arbitrary to assign, for example to a hospital or a
surgeon, the similar roles of “provider”.
A possible solution would be, instead of using precise roles in order to distinguish between parts of
service delivery processes, to define instead different object properties characterizing the various
possible forms of participations of actors to processes and more specifically service delivery.
Finally, we believe that this work also highlights the need for mid-level ontologies between upper-
level ontologies and domain ontologies. While the notion of “service” is not domain-independent
enough to be directly integrated into an upper-level ontology like BFO or UFO, it also seems to us to
go beyond the purely biomedical or commercial domain.
6 References
[1] Robert Arp, Barry Smith, and Andrew D. Spear. Building Ontologies with Basic Formal
Ontology. MIT Press. 2015. Retrieved January 10, 2018 from
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17kk7vw
[2] Anita Bandrowski, Ryan Brinkman, Mathias Brochhausen, Matthew H. Brush, Bill Bug,… Jie
Zheng. The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. PLOS ONE 11, 4 (April 2016), e0154556.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154556
[3] Adrien Barton, Laure Vieu, and Jean-François Ethier. Directing actions. In 2019 Joint Ontology
Workshops Episode V: The Styrian Autumn of Ontology, JOWO 2019, CEUR-WS.org, Graz;
Austria.
[4] Adrien Barton, Paul Fabry, Luc Lavoie, and Jean-François Ethier. LABO: An Ontology for
Laboratory Test Prescription and Reporting. In Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops
2019 Episode V: The Styrian Autumn of Ontology, Graz, Austria, September 23-25, 2019.
Retrieved from http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2518/paper-ODLS2.pdf
[5] Mathias Brochhausen, Mauricio Almeida, and Laura Slaughter. Towards a formal representation
of document acts and resulting legal entities. In Johanssonian Investigations. 2013 120–139.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110322507.120
[6] Werner Ceusters and Barry Smith. Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact
Ontology. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO
2015). CEUR vol. 1515, 1–5.
[7] Bo Edvardsson, Anders Gustafsson, and Inger Roos. Service portraits in service research: a
critical review. International Journal of Service Industry Management 16, 1 (2005), 107–121.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1108/09564230510587177
[8] Jean‐François Ethier, McGilchrist Mark, Barton Adrien, Cloutier Anne‐Marie, Curcin Vasa,
Delaney Brendan C., and Burgun Anita. The TRANSFoRm project: Experience and lessons
learned regarding functional and interoperability requirements to support primary care. Learning
Health Systems (2017). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/lrh2.10037
[9] J.-F. Ethier, V. Curcin, A. Barton, M. M. McGilchrist, H. Bastiaens, A. Andreasson, J. Rossiter,
L. Zhao, T. N. Arvanitis, A. Taweel, B. C. Delaney, and A. Burgun. Clinical data integration
model. Core interoperability ontology for research using primary care data. Methods Inf Med 54,
1 (2015), 16–23. DOI:https://doi.org/10.3414/ME13-02-0024
[10] J.-F. Ethier, F. Goyer, P. Fabry, and A. Barton. The prescription of drug ontology 2.0 (PDRO):
More than the sum of its parts. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public
Health 18, 22 (2021). DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182212025
[11] Paul Fabry, Francois Goyer, Adrien Barton, and Jean-Francois Ethier. An Ontological Analysis
of Health Procedure Information. 12th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO
2021) Bolzano; Italy, 13.
[12] Roberta Ferrario and Nicola Guarino. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science.
In Future Internet – FIS 2008, John Domingue, Dieter Fensel and Paolo Traverso (eds.). Springer
Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009, 152–169. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-
00985-3_13
[13] Aldo Gangemi, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, and Alessandro Oltramari. Sweetening
WORDNET with DOLCE. AI Magazine 24, 3 (Fall 2003), 13.
[14] Giancarlo Guizzardi and Gerd Wagner. Using the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as a
Foundation for General Conceptual Modeling Languages. In Theory and Applications of
Ontology: Computer Applications, Roberto Poli, Michael Healy and Achilles Kameas (eds.).
Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, 2010, 175–196. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8847-
5_8
[15] Vinod C. Kaggal, Ravikumar Komandur Elayavilli, Saeed Mehrabi, Joshua J. Pankratz,
Sunghwan Sohn,… Hongfang Liu. Toward a Learning Health-care System – Knowledge Delivery
at the Point of Care Empowered by Big Data and NLP. Biomed Inform Insights 8, Suppl 1 (2016),
13–22. DOI:https://doi.org/10.4137/BII.S37977
[16] Christina Khnaisser, Luc Lavoie, Benoit Fraikin, Adrien Barton, Samuel Dussault, Anita Burgun,
and Jean-François Ethier. Using an ontology to derive a sharable and interoperable relational data
model for heterogeneous healthcare data and various applications [Submitted for minor revision].
Methods Inf Med (2022).
[17] Eric C Merrell, Olivier Massin, and Barry Smith. Common Core Conformant Definitions for an
Ontology of Commercial Exchange. 8.
[18] Julio Cesar Nardi, Ricardo de Almeida Falbo, João Paulo A. Almeida, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Luís
Ferreira Pires, Marten J. van Sinderen, and Nicola Guarino. 2013. Towards a Commitment-Based
Reference Ontology for Services. In 17th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object
Computing Conference, 2013, 175–184. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/EDOC.2013.28
[19] Nicholas Sioutos, Sherri de Coronado, Margaret W. Haber, Frank W. Hartel, Wen-Ling Shaiu,
and Lawrence W. Wright. NCI Thesaurus: a semantic model integrating cancer-related clinical
and molecular information. J Biomed Inform 40, 1 (February 2007), 30–43.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2006.02.013
[20] Barry Smith, Michael Ashburner, Cornelius Rosse, Jonathan Bard, William Bug,… Suzanna
Lewis. The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data
integration. Nat Biotechnol 25, 11 (2007), 1251. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1346
[21] service. Retrieved April 29, 2022 from
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/fr/dictionnaire/anglais/service