Ontological Approach in Smart Service Systems: A Literature Review

Abstract

A smart service system is defined as one that can understand a customer's situation and then recommend the best solutions to the customer, thereby increasing customer value creation. Exploring knowledge related to customers, context, and services/products is essential to offer services intelligently. Ontological approaches are promising methods for organizing and exploring knowledge due to their strong capacity of expression and reasoning. Smart service systems leveraging ontologies have been investigated for decades, but the conception and design of those systems remain difficult tasks due to the lack of an overall framework served as a guideline. This paper aims at conducting a literature review of ontology-based smart service systems to address this challenge. The findings include a classification and an analysis to determine essential elements of those systems, identified research gaps, and suggestions for future research.