Service Ontology

“What is a service?” The notion of “services” is inherently well understood by people, but it is difficult to define explicitly. The area of “service science” has recently been adopted to investigate the nature of services. Our project aims provide an ontological definition for the notion of a “service”. This project is inspired by out work in the social services, a community-based and locally-focused service network that relies on personal connections as much as technological advancements.

Towards this goal, we have been running workshops at JOWO on ontologies of services and the societies they shape and serve.

OSS - International Workshop on Ontologies for Services and Society

Past events:

Semantic Technologies provide a formal way to represent knowledge in ways that are interoperable by computers and a related technology stack to store, integrate and query information semantically.

The purpose of the OSS workshop is to foster communication and strengthen interdisciplinary work at the intersection of semantic technologies, society, and services. We invite researchers from the Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, and Machine Learning communities to submit theoretical contributions, novel algorithms, artifacts, and tools related to the interaction of society and service provisioning. We welcome reports from sociologists and service practitioners across various society-focused domains (e.g. social workers, therapists, physicians, probation officers, urban planners, etc.) on their experiences using semantic-enabled technologies, best practices, and insights.

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions from researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of semantic technologies and social services and social service practitioners developing ontological artifacts.

  • New ontologies and Semantic Data Models for Social Services (see the 2020 proposed guidelines for publishing ontologies)​​
  • Ontology extension for Societal Services (e.g. DOLCE, SUMO, FOAF, GoodRelations)
  • Knowledge Acquisition including ontology learning, natural language processing, and service plan extraction and optimization.
  • Knowledge Management
  • Semantic Data Integration
  • Knowledge-based Decision Support Systems, such as recommender systems and information retrieval.
  • Service governance, including trust, cooperation, and competition.
  • Human Resource related ontologies.
  • System Assessment and Analysis, including policy evaluation, economic analysis, impact models, Social Return on Investment (SROI)
  • Service client outcome assessment, including risk assessment and conflict resolution.
  • Industry Applications and Case-studies, including Linked Data Applications, Semantic Web, and Knowledge Graphs, lessons learned and best practices.
  • Governance of data models for societal data sets.
  • Social Change Theory, including ontology of practitioner paradigms, educational material, and practice, behavior theory, cognitive theory.
  • Models of stakeholder goals, needs, roles (e.g. belief-desires-intentions models, UNSDG Goals , service providers and funders, socioeconomic determinants)
  • Models of society and human services, including service provisioning, process modeling, economic and funding models, sustainability, and client agency.
  • Cross-disciplinary research in sociology and service provisioning and related areas, including public services, public health, government services, urban planning, and the judicial system.