This XG started on 17 September 2010 and closed on 27 October 2011. See the Final Report.
The mission of the Unified Service Description Language Incubator Group is to define a language for describing general and generic parts of technical and business services to allow services to become tradable and consumable. See the charter for more information.
W3C Advisory Committee Representatives may join this XG on behalf of their organizations by completing this online form. Non-Members may join W3C or ask the Chair of an Incubator Group to participate as an Invited Expert, subject to W3C's policy for approval of Invited Experts. In order to become an Invited Expert to the USDL XG, just fill out the following two simple forms. The first gets you a W3C log-in, and the second is an agreement to W3C RF patent policy:
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The USDL XG was initiated by Attensity, DFKI, SAP, and Siemens in September 2010. It will take the current and available specification of USDL and form it to the needs of the standardization body. In order to get a most valuable and comprehensive result, the work in the XG is basically split in three work streams:
The final outcome will be a report with a reworked USDL specification and an assessment of how to proceed with USDL in September 2011. More information about the XG can be found in our Wiki. USDL is one part of the Internet of Services initiative. This page contains more information about USDL and our vision of the Internet of Services. You can also contact the chair (Kay Kadner) if you have any questions or concerns.
A list of planned and completed deliverables can be found in the deliverable section of our Wiki.
The minutes can be found in our Wiki.
The Unified Service Description Language (USDL) is proposed as a “master data model for services” to describe various types of services ranging from professional to electronic services. It aims at a holistic service description putting a special focus on business aspects such as ownership and provisioning, release stages in a service network, composition and bundling, pricing and legal aspects among others, in addition to technical aspects.
First iterations of USDL were solely built by SAP Research expending several person years of effort. About a dozen researchers at SAP Research contributed to the model by bringing in their expertise from different backgrounds (computer scientists, incl. security and SLA experts, business economists, legal scientists, etc.). This was carried out in the context of several publicly funded research projects under the Internet of Services theme. The current specifications of this work stream can be found at www.internet-of-services.com and is known as USDL3.
Subsequent iterations of USDL include the contributions and evaluation feedbacks of partners external to SAP Research. As an example, the German Fraunhofer FOKUS institute is prompted to include aspects such as identity management and Siemens evaluates USDL in controlled experiments in their setting. Finally, the scope of input is broadened even wider by approaching a standardization body starting with this Incubator group.