Generating new service concepts based on ontology integration

Despite the fact that the service concept generation is considered as a key factor for success of new service development, relatively little attention has been paid to how to generate new service concepts. In response, this paper proposes a novel approach to generation of new service concepts based on ontology integration. Since ontology aims to capture the specification of concepts in a specific domain, knowledge set of a domain composed of concept network with various descriptions and relationships can be derived. In addition, creative combination of concepts and relationships between different domains can be generated by integrating ontologies, which makes new service concepts to be generated. Thus, proposed approach suggests how to generate the new service concepts using ontology integration with three steps - construction of service concept ontology, integration of ontologies, and generation of new service concepts. The proposed approach is expected to help service managers to understand the structure of currently provided services and identify candidate service concepts to be generated, thus generate the new service concepts.