Abstract
As a growing number of economic transactions tend to happen in the Web, their legal implications and assumptions need to be made explicit in the proper way, in order to facilitate interoperability across different normative systems, encourage transparency towards the end users and ultimately promote trust in automated services. In particular, potentially ambiguous terms (and often apparently unproblematic ones) mentioned in these transactions need to be carefully analyzed in order to clarify the distinctions between slightly different meanings, describing hidden relationships and implicit constraints. One of these terms, highly overloaded nowadays, is “service”. Indeed, the very fact that services are now offered through the Web, and that the notion of service is at the core of a wholly new organizational paradigm—service-oriented systems—suggests the need to carefully (re)consider this notion. In this paper we shall attempt this analysis under the perspective of formal ontology, with a special attention to the legal aspects. The approach we take is that services are complex temporal entities (events) based on the central notion of commitment. Analyzing services as complex events allows us to clarify the relationships between the various agents that participate to these events playing specific roles, with specific responsibilities; moreover, this analysis explains a classic economic (and legal) distinction between services and goods, based on the fact that goods are both transactable and transferable, while services are transactable but not transferable. Assuming that transferability is intended as transferability of ownership, we argue that the ontological reason why services are not transferable is exactly because they are events: you cannot own an event, since if owning implies being in control of temporal behaviour, then, strictly speaking (at the token level), the temporal behaviour of an event is already determined, and changing it would result in a different event. So events are not transferable simply because they are not “ownable”. Since services are events, they are not transferable as well. Of course, this implies a shared understanding of what ownership, responsibility, duty, right etc. mean, and the paper is a first effort in this direction.
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Notes
- 1.
Alternatively, instead of focusing on actions to be executed, one can decide to treat commitment as directed towards conditions to be achieved, as it happens in Chesbrough and Spohrer (2006). In this case, the commitment’s content can be expressed by a proposition. In the perspective of services, this difference amounts to focusing on the actions that must be executed in order to reach a certain desired state or directly on the achievement of such desired state. We could in fact leave this choice open, as the two alternatives seem both very reasonable: sometimes the customer is just interested in some particular state to hold, disregarding how it has been reached, other times the commitment concerns the action to be performed, even independently of the actual achievement of a specific result. In any case, we believe the latter case is more frequent and thus representing a commitment with respect to actions is more in line with our analysis.
- 2.
Although the term “event” has often a dynamic connotation, we use such term in the more general sense of entity which occurs in time (also called perdurant in the DOLCE ontology). In this understanding, states and processes are considered as special event kinds.
- 3.
We assume that the commitment act (the speech act) is instantaneous, and occurs at a time which does not necessarily coincide with the beginning of the availability state.
- 4.
In the actual practice, the term “service level agreement” typically refers to the negotiation that the producer conducts with the user; here we are using the locution in a coarser sense, which includes also the provider-producer and provider-user agreements, as well as, possibly, those between the provider and the community to which services are provided.
- 5.
In some cases, like in rental services, the service customer may coincide with the service producer. We do not discuss this case here, however.
- 6.
To be more precise, it is the observation of such event that triggers the action. It is worth noting that, for this reason, many services include among their supporting activities an explicit monitoring activity, which can be executed by the producer itself or delegated to another agent.
- 7.
An interesting analysis of the notion of ownership can be found in McCarty (2002).
- 8.
Rights were already clearly distinguished in Gaius’ classification of the law as objects: “Res incorporales: things which cannot be touched, such as those consisting in rights, e.g. an inheritance, a usufruct, obligations”.
- 9.
And this would therefore imply that complaints can still be directed to the State in case the service provided by the private company does not work well.
- 10.
In the context of public services, a single event of customized service production is often called an intervention.
- 11.
Even in the case of free, public services, it is difficult to imagine a case where the customer is not required to actually discover the service, or make a minimal sacrifice to exploit it.
- 12.
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Acknowledgments
This work is carried out under the scope of the activities of the LEGO lab (http://www.lego-lab.it), a joint e-government initiative located in Trento, as well as the TOCAI.IT project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Research (Tecnologie Orientate alla Conoscenza per Aggregazioni di Imprese su InterneT) and the project “CSS—Cartella Socio-Sanitaria” founded by the Autonomous Province of Trento. The initial ideas at the basis of this project have emerged from a fruitful collaboration with “Servizio Politiche Sociali e Abitative” of the Autonomous Province of Trento concerning the revision of a catalog of social services, to be shared among different Public Administrations. The first author is funded by a PostDoc grant from the Autonomous Province of Trento.
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Ferrario, R., Guarino, N., Fernández-Barrera, M. (2011). Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective. In: Sartor, G., Casanovas, P., Biasiotti, M., Fernández-Barrera, M. (eds) Approaches to Legal Ontologies. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0120-5_14
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