The shifting focus of service from the 1980s to 2000s has proved that IT not only lowers the cost of service but creates avenues to enhance and increase revenue through service. The new type of service, e-service, is mobile, flexible, interactive, and interchangeable. While service science provides an avenue for future service researches, the specific research areas from the IT perspective still need to be elaborated. This book introduces a novel concept-service mining-to address several research areas from technology, model, management, and application perspectives. Service mining is defined as "a systematical process including service discovery, service experience, service recovery, and service retention to discover unique patterns and exceptional values within the existing services." The goal of service mining is similar to data mining, text mining, or web mining, and aims to "detect something new" from the service pool. The major difference is the feature of service is quite distinct from the mining target, like data or text. This book devises concepts of service mining and identifies the possible applications. The author provides a roadmap of service mining to researchers, managers, and marketers in service sectors.
