Modelling Capabilities as Attribute-Featured Entities

The concept of capability is a fundamental element not only for Service Oriented Architecture but also for Enterprise Information Systems. This concepts denotes what an action (i.e., a service, a program, a business process, etc.) can do from a functional perspective. Despite its importance, current approaches do not model it properly: either they confuse it with an annotated invocation interface or do not go beyond the classical IOPE paradigm which, from an end user perspective, does not have an intuitive description of what is the capability being modeled. In this paper, we present a conceptual model as an RDF-schema for describing capabilities as attribute-featured entities which is more user friendly. Actually, we consider a capability as an action verb and a set of domain specific attributes that relates to an exact business meaning. This way, we are able to represent capabilities at several levels of abstraction from the most abstract one with just an action verb to the most concrete one that corresponds to the exact need of an end user which is not possible with current capability modelling approaches. We are also able to interlink capabilities for creating a hierarchical structure that allows for improving the discovery process. Our meta model is based on RDF and makes use of Linked Data to define capability attributes as well as their values.