An Overview of the Unified Service Description Language

Existing service description languages focus mainly on the technical aspects of automated services, hence all other types of service - namely human and IT supported - and the business aspects of service provision - pricing for instance - are yet to be adequately addressed. This paper introduces the latest version of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL), a domain-independent service description language aimed at all of the above-mentioned types of service, from both a business and a technical perspective. For the latter is already captured by widely adopted service description standards, such as WSDL and WS-BPEL, USDL does leverage those languages. Apart from aggregating technical information, a service provider can use USDL to describe business-related properties, capabilities and non-functional characteristics, enabling consumers to invoke and use business services and intermediaries to repurpose services. USDL has been developed mainly by SAP Research, which is driving its standardization with other stakeholders. This paper gives an overview of the USDL language and presents an editor to define and serialize USDL service descriptions.