A Conceptual Framework for Conversations and Services

In this article a conceptual framework is developed that specifies the terms and their relationships that will be used for specifying conversational processes in ELeGI. The first part consists of a glossary of terms, each with an informal, textual description. These descriptions are the basis for more formal definitions as to be further specified in a machine readable and re-usable ontology. This ontology, represented in OWL is still under development. This ontology, specifies the building stones for the second part: the framework itself. The framework describes at a very abstract level the dependencies between conversational processes and service providing/requesting. It is an abstract model that is to be used (and validated) in analyzing protocols of human-human conversations, and a source of reference in building conversational architectures in ELeGI.