About USDL
The Internet of Services requires a way of describing services in order to wrap and expose them in a novel way. Considering a service as an economic or social transaction with a broader context, it is essential to describe the price scheme, the service level agreement, or the terms and conditions when consuming the service and paying for it. Also third-party intermediaries, such as brokers, cloud providers, and channel partners are interested in the business details as well as the technical details of a service in order to extend services and their delivery and, thus, further monetize services.
As a response to this situation, the Unified Service Description Language (USDL), creates a “commercial envelope” around a service. More specifically, USDL allows a unified description of business, operational and technical aspects of services as depicted in the figure. Technical services may be lifted to business services, but USDL also allows describing more manual or physical services. As many services have a hybrid character with both, a digital and physical or manual footprint, USDL can facilitate the combination and aggregation of such services. Therefore, USDL can be considered one of the foundational technologies to set up an Internet of Services around today’s core enterprise systems.
USDL went through several iterations since its conception in 2007. The introduction of Linked USDL targets simplification and reuse of existing schemas on the basis of Linked Data principles and technologies. Although Linked USDL is sponsored by FI-Ware, the Linked USDL community has been established in order to foster an open development as well as a broad and world-wide adoption.
The links below refer to the discontinued USDL version 3.0 milestone M5 which has been developed in the Eclipse Modeling Framework. Since Linked USDL merely introduces a new representation syntax, the original content of USDL version 3.0 is sustained. Therefore, the links given under More information are still valid. The Resources concern USDL version 3.0 only and are no longer maintained.
More Information
- Normative scientific reference: A Unified Description Language for Human to Automated Services
- Most comprehensive documentation: Handbook of Service Description: USDL and its Methods
- Video lecture series: HPI Tele-task
- Standardization: W3C Incubator Group
Resources
- Tools
- Examples
- Specifications