kay.kadner

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    The Unified Service Description Language (USDL) is used to describe almost any kind of services with more than just technical data. Especially price plans are important for a business-oriented Internet of Services. Find more information about it on www.internet-of-services.com.

    It was developed in THESEUS TEXO and has been pushed towards standardization at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as one of the project's dissemination goals. Therefore, SAP was chairing the USDL Incubator Group (XG) for about one year now. This XG has been finished and closed effectively October 27th 2011. Time to look back upon what has been achieved.

    The mission of the USDL Incubator Group was to work on the already existing proposal for USDL in three directions: investigate similar approaches and relate them to USDL, reshape the specification to align it with W3C and feedback that was collected, and prove practical relevance by creating reference test cases by various partners. During the XG's lifetime, the group shifted the focus away from working on the language itself in order to better concentrate on use cases and adoption. The Incubator Group Report therefore contains a comprehensive overview and assessment of other languages, specifications and approaches that were considered to be related to USDL. The report also contains a description of our reference test cases and their implementations, a list of issues and ideas of improvement for the next version of USDL, and a statement from some partners about USDL.

    The XG attracted participants from various companies, research institutes, and also people that were personally interested in that topic: colleagues from HP, ca technologies, DERI Galway, Fraunhofer, Telefónica de España, Univrsidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of Helsinki, The Open University, and others.

    Overall, it can be concluded that the XG was a success and networks were established that we would not have reached without the XG. We gathered feedback for improvement and created public interest for USDL. Therefore, the XG recommends to follow up on USDL by creating a W3C Working Group to advance it into a real standard.

    In the previous Describing Services in the Internet of Services, the idea behind the Internet of Services was described. In the meantime, the USDL specification has been updated, and so have the tools. As you probably know, some tools for creating documents in the USDL format are available as open source software via the SourceForge platform. This is in particular the USDL Editor for creating USDL based service descriptions with a comprehensive user interface. However, the underlying USDL Model library is open source as well. This library is used to deal with the data structure, which means it provides an API for accessing the attributes and elements of USDL. Additionally, the model library can be used to read and write XML-based USDL files.

    Both tools, the USDL Editor and the USDL Model have been updated to the latest specification USDL 3M5 and also contain some bugfixes. They are available on SourceForge and can be downloaded: editor download, model download. Please do not use the SDN version of the USDL Editor any longer, as it is outdated.

    As an example for using USDL in the daily business, consider a German medium-sized company, which happens to be a market leader in turbine construction. For the first time in the company’s history, products have to be exported to Siberia. This requires a 4th party logistics provider (4PL) as well as additional services such as customs clearance, container rental, GOST R certification, etc.

    Today the company is forced to look up the yellow pages and to tediously inquire the set of required individual services by social interaction. In the future, the Internet of Services enables service providers to publish business and operational aspects via USDL. Service marketplaces and USDL allow for efficiently finding and selecting services and service bundles. More detailed explanation about this example and the USDL files are located at http://www.internet-of-services.com/index.php?id=589&L=0.

    The Internet of Services is SAP Research's vision for the Internet of the future, aka Business Web. The basic idea is that services are described more comprehensively as they are today. Especially for the Business Web, information about services like price models, legal entities, contact information, etc. are necessary. This data does not fit into current specifications like WSDL or similar approaches. Therefore, SAP Research has developed USDL (Unified Service Description Language), which can be used to model the missing pieces as described before. This enables new applications and ways of using, interacting, and orchestrating services, as you can read in SAP.info.

    USDL is divided in several modules for specific purposes like participants, functional, pricing, and interaction. Further modules like legal and service level are currently under investigation. This means that they are less mature than the other modules. In order to put it on a solid basis, SAP Research and 3 other companies have started a W3C Incubator Group for USDL (W3C USDL XG Homepage). In this Incubator Group, we have the opportunity to improve USDL together with external companies and universities like HP, CA, Stanford University and others.

    USDL is modeled using EMF/Ecore. Therefore, we have developed a tool for manipulating USDL files based on Eclipse. You can download it at the SDN Download Catalog and try it for free. This editor should considered to be an expert tool for debug purposes, as you can use it to model every feature of USDL. SAP Research is working on an end-user friendly version. Below you can find two screenshots of the current editor.

    USDL Editor Overview tab USDL Editor pricing