Agent is a category that represents the essential properties of any type of agentive substantial, such as person, organization, or software agent, which may have distinct principles of identity.
During service negotiation, service provider and target customer interact in order to establish an agreement regarding their commitments and claims with respect to an eventual service delivery.
A service negotiation is motivated by the interest of a target customer in the service offering, considering its contents (including the conditions to be satisfied by the service customer in case it hires the service provider).
A service offering is the social relator that arises from the service offer event, and that can be described by service offering descriptions, i.e., normative descriptions in UFO-C.
Service Offering claims are intrinsic moments that inhere in the target customer community and are externally-dependent on the metacommitted agent (acting as service provider).
Service offering commitments and claims are social moments (in the sense of UFO-C), i.e., offering commitments are intrinsic moments, which inhere in the meta-committed agent (acting as service provider) and are externally-dependent on the target customer community.
The actual content of service offering commitments (and corresponding claims) depends on the particular service business model, and, therefore, can refer to several 64 different elements, such as conditions and requirements for providing the service, types of actions to be performed in the scope of service delivery, constraints, required customer’s commitments (such as payment), etc.
UFO-S is a commitment-based service ontology whose conceptualization is based on the establishment and fulfillment of commitments and claims between service participants (service providers and service customers) along the service life cycle.