Extending Linked USDL by Trust Assertion

Since a decade researchers of information systems try to generalize descriptions of services and service transactions to enable automatic discovery and matchmaking of services to empower the vision of the digitalization of the service industry. Industry 4.0. is an actual challenge that requires those generic descriptions of services to enable search, comparison and matchmaking of service requests and service advertisements by the use of semantics of services. The Unified Service Description Language (USDL) is the most cited and popular research strand were researchers try to unify the vocabulary and description of service transactions for the purposes of digitalizing services not only from a technical perspective, but also from a business view to facilitate the trade of services on the web. But the research in USDL is by history an informatics driven matter due to its´ growth out of the SOA paradigm. This article proposes an extension of the business perspective of Linked USDL by linking it to the Trust Assertion Ontology (TAO), so that the trustworthiness evaluation of a service offer is incorporated into the USDL model. This research fills a gap of USDL, so that it can be better applied for describing service interactions in business environments.