The Handbook of Service Description introduces an in-depth overview of service description efforts. The Handbook of Service Description is the normative scientific reference for the upcoming standardization of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL).

The Internet of Services and USDL.- Product-Service System Approaches.- Service Network Approaches.- Service System Approaches.- SOA Approaches.- SemanticWeb Services Fundamentals.- Semantic Web Services Approaches.- Design Overview of USDL.- Service Pricing.- Service Licensing.- Service Functionality and Behavior.- Service Levels, Security, and Trust.-Modeling Foundations.- Representing USDL for Humans and Tools.- Enabling USDL by Tools.- Supporting USDL by a Governance Framework.- Managing Variants of USDL.- Case Studies.- Experience Report on Real-World Manual Service Modeling in USDL.- Requirements for a Service Description Language—Findings from a Delphi Study.- How Complete is the USDL?.

With the growth in number and sophistication of services widely available, there is a new urgency for comprehensive service descriptions that take into account both technical and business aspects. The last years have seen a number of efforts for best-of-breed service description focusing on specific aspects of services. The Handbook of Service Description provides the most advanced state of the art insights into these.The main parts of the book provide the most detailed documentation of the  Unified Service Description Language (USDL) to date. USDL has been developed across several research institutes and publicly funded projects across Europe and Australia, currently extending to the Americas as part of a standardization push through W3C. The scope of services extends across IT and business, i.e., the socio-technical sense of services scaled to business networks. In this respect, purely human, purely automated and mixed human/automated services were considered, that have a boundary of cognizance that is available through the tasks of service provisioning, discovery, access and delivery.Taken together, the Handbook of Service Description provides a comprehensive reference suitable for a wide-reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service description and its methodological aspects.