Services

In the interests of expanding our vocabulary to cover new aspects of the current environment, here is yet another helpful suggestion 😉
In the Web 2.0 world of lightweight service composition, we want to make functionality available through web services interfaces so that it can be readily recombined with other functionality to create greater value. A service oriented approach requires services – machine interfaces – to be available.
So, one might say that functionality that is available as a web service and usable in this way is …… ‘service-able’.
OK .. so it may not catch on either 😉
Of course, ‘service’ is one of those words which it has become very difficult to use in some conversations without qualification (like ‘archive’) as it may be used in a technical sense (functionality available at a machine interface on the network) or in a more general sense (functionality offered in any way – a dry cleaning service, a reference service). And this issue is compounded in the term ‘web service’, which again may be used in a reserved sense (a SOAP- or REST-based service on the network) or in a more general way.