E-services in e-business engineering

• This paper highlights the role of e-business engineering in e-commerce and e-business and its scope in computer and management science.
• The paper illustrates the interdependency between ICT and e-business market by their intricate interactions.
• New business model takes advantage of innovative technologies to create new market opportunity and new technologies are developed to meet the requirements of new business model.
• Some of hottest commodities in e-commerce in the current market are cloud service and Internet of services.
• This leads to the fast growing e-service marketplaces, but they cannot be managed and governed properly due to lack of methods to automate generation of service descriptions.
• The paper points out the research directions such as developing appropriate standardized service description and registry and proposing new AI based methods to achieve automated generation of service description for service discovery, selection and composition.

E-business engineering involves the study of evolving IT technologies and management science approaches to revolutionise e-business models and behaviors, and the demands from new e-business activities that prompt the development of new technologies and to make progress on management methods. In this essay, the scope of e-business engineering is illustrated and its importance to e-business is highlighted. Service-oriented computing (SOC) was chosen among numerous related topics for further analysis due to its role in the increasing popularity of cloud services and Internet of services (IoS) as they are hot commodities in e-business and important enabling technologies for e-business. The focus of this state-of-the-art review is on two SOC core technologies: service description language and service registries for service discovery and composition. A number of key frameworks and developments in the area are discussed in terms of their pros and cons and their associated challenges in the fast growing e-services marketplace. This essay also points out future developments and research directions to meet the related challenges, such as the standardization of service description and directory modelling, and the automated generation of annotation based on semantics and domain ontology.