An Ontological Approach for Eliciting and Understanding Needs in e-Services

Abstract. The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within eservice initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe customer needs, and the necessary e-services that satisfy such needs, and (2) to bundle elementary e-services into needs-satisfying e-service bundles. The ontology as well as the associated reasoning mechanisms are codified in RDFS to enable software support for need elicitation and service bundling. A case study from the Norwegian energy sector is used to demonstrate how we put our theory into practice.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CAISE
• Authors: Ziv Baida, Jaap Gordijn, Hanne Sæle, Hans Akkermans, Andrei Z. Morch
• Keywords: CAISE 2005, Customer Needs, E-service, Norwegian Energy Sector