The long tail phenomenon has been heavily discussed in recentyears. What has been neglected so far is its striking relevance forelectronic services. Whereas consumers expectations about informationgoods are often vague and transient, their requirements are pronouncedand specific when it comes to...

The long tail phenomenon has been heavily discussed in recent years. What has been neglected so far is its striking relevance for electronic services. Whereas consumers expectations about information goods are often vague and transient, their requirements are pronounced and specific when it...

Automated use of electronic services calls for comprehensive service description languages.A couple of description languages have been developed so far each with a specific focus. Wedistinguish three different layers, syntactic, semantic, and resource description languages.In this paper we...

The fundamental paradigm shift from traditional value chains to agile service value networks implies new economic and organizational challenges. As coordination mechanisms, auctions have proven to perform quite well in situations where intangible and heterogeneous goods are traded. Nevertheless,...

Lately, a new computing paradigm has emerged: “Cloud Computing”. It seems to be promoted as heavily as the “Grid” was a few years ago, causing broad discussions on the differences between Grid and Cloud Computing. The first contribution of this paper is thus a detailed discussion about...

The current trend towards dynamic and highly scalableservice provisioning fosters the rise of Software as a Service(SaaS) platforms and so called Compute Clouds. Theon-demand provisioning of services gains more and moreinfluence. For offering enriched services that are capableof performing...