The Price of Services

摘要

If we accept that service providers and service users all operate with autonomy in some form of market place, then a necessary prerequisite for service discovery and engagement is the description of the non-functional properties of a service. Price acts as one of the key nonfunctional properties used in choosing candidate services. Conventional services describe prices using several approaches (e.g. fixed price, price ranges, proportional pricing, dynamic price mechanisms). Furthermore, there are associated concepts such as price matching, price granularity, taxes and reward schemes that might need to be taken into consideration. This paper offers a discussion of the non-functional property of price. By incorporating some information about price, service descriptions will move away from the narrow distributed computing view of web services, enabling greater reasoning with respect to service descriptions.