Social Semantic Web and Collective Knowledge System as Technological enablers for value co-creation in service systems

Purpose – Service Science is the study of Service Systems and of the co-creation of value within networks of integrated resources (Spohrer et al., 2008). Thus, value creation becomes the core part of services and can be interpreted by using different views. Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) considers the roles of producers and consumers as not distinct. This means that value is always co-created by means of the interactions among providers and consumers. In this context, the purpose of this work is to propose and motivate the Collective Knowledge Systems (CKS) model and the (Social) Semantic Web platform as technological enablers for value co-creation. Design/Methodology/approach – CKSs are human-computer systems in which machines enable the gathering of human-generated knowledge (Gruber, 2008). This work aims at defining a framework in which a Service System handles “collective intelligence” (provided by businesses, customers, etc.) considering the principles of CKSs. In this scenario, the role of the Social Web (Bojars et al., 2008) is to gather the "collective intelligence" through Web 2.0 apps and the role of the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, 2001) is to create new value from the collected data, by exploiting knowledge representation and reasoning techniques. Findings – As a proof of concept we focused on a Customer Care Service that receives customers’ requests (Web 2.0 application), tries to match requests with available answers and returns the most suitable matches. All the available answers, as well as customers’ requests, are represented and annotated by means of Semantic Web vocabularies like SIOC1. If there is no match, the request is broadcasted on a community (possibly containing also customers with similar problems) which can answer to it. The answer is “semanticized”, relayed to the customer who made the request and stored to be made available for next requests. The requesting customer can rate the request by using ReviewRDF2. New value is co-created by both a community of people and an adequate use of Semantic Technologies. Originality/value – The main proposal of this work is that Service Systems are modeled as CKSs by means of Social Semantic Web technologies. This aspect allows communities of businesses and customers, connected to a service, to co-create value that is “semanticized” and immediately exploited as an improvement of the service itself. This is also the original contribution of this paper.