Europe (i/ˈjʊərəp/ or /ˈjɜːrəp/) is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. To the east and southeast, Europe is generally considered as separated from Asia by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Yet the borders of Europe—a concept dating back to classical antiquity—are arbitrary, as the primarily physiographic term "continent" also incorporates cultural and political elements.
Europe is the world's second-smallest continent by surface area, covering about 10,180,000 square kilometres (3,930,000 sq mi) or 2% of the Earth's surface and about 6.8% of its land area. Of Europe's approximately 50 countries, Russia is by far the largest by both area and population, taking up 40% of the continent (although the country has territory in both Europe and Asia), while Vatican City is the smallest. Europe is the third-most populous continent after Asia and Africa, with a population of 739–743 million or about 11% of the world's population. Europe has a climate heavily affected by warm Atlantic currents, tempering winters and enabling warm summers on most of the continent, even on latitudes that have severe climates in North America and Asia. Further from the Atlantic, seasonal differences increase, but the mildness of the climate remains.
In Greek mythology Europa (/jʊˈroʊpə, jə-/; Greek: Εὐρώπη Eurṓpē) was the mother of King Minos of Crete, a woman with Phoenician origin of high lineage, and for whom the continent Europe was named. The story of her abduction by Zeus in the form of a white bull was a Cretan story; as Kerényi points out "most of the love-stories concerning Zeus originated from more ancient tales describing his marriages with goddesses. This can especially be said of the story of Europa".
Europa's earliest literary reference is in the Iliad, which is commonly dated to the 8th century B.C. Another early reference to her is in a fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, discovered at Oxyrhynchus. The earliest vase-painting securely identifiable as Europa, dates from mid-7th century B.C.
The etymology of her Greek name (εὐρύς eurys "wide" or "broad" and ὤψ ops "eye(s)" or "face") suggests that Europa as a divine spirit represented the wide-faced cow Hathor, at least on some symbolic level. Metaphorically, at a later date her name could be construed as the intelligent or open-minded, analogous to glaukopis (γλαυκῶπις) attributed to Athena. However, Ernest Klein and Giovanni Semerano suggest a possible Semitic origin in Akkadian erebu "to go down, set" (in reference to the sun) which would parallel occident.
The term Team Europe is used in a number of sports to designate a unified team of European countries in several sports competitions. Whilst neither the European Union nor the Council of Europe are countries themselves, European teams have been formed to compete in several international competitions. The most famous of these is the Ryder Cup in golf which sees a European team play against a team from the USA in even-numbered years. In football, a selection of European footballers play occasionally for charity games and anniversary games in the Europe XI team.
"Team Europe" is the official designation of the team representing Europe in several international competitions
In economics, a service is an intangible commodity. That is, services are an example of intangible economic goods.
Service provision is often an economic activity where the buyer does not generally, except by exclusive contract, obtain exclusive ownership of the thing purchased. The benefits of such a service, if priced, are held to be self-evident in the buyer's willingness to pay for it. Public services are those, that society (nation state, fiscal union, regional) as a whole pays for, through taxes and other means.
By composing and orchestrating the appropriate level of resources, skill, ingenuity, and experience for effecting specific benefits for service consumers, service providers participate in an economy without the restrictions of carrying inventory (stock) or the need to concern themselves with bulky raw materials. On the other hand, their investment in expertise does require consistent service marketing and upgrading in the face of competition.
Business services are a recognisable subset of Economic services, and share their characteristics. The essential difference is that Business are concerned about the building of Service Systems in order to deliver value to their customers and to act in the roles of Service Provider and Service Consumer.
The generic clear-cut, complete, concise and consistent definition of the service term reads as follows:
A service is a set of one time consumable and perishable benefits
In the context of enterprise architecture, service-orientation and service-oriented architecture, the term service refers to a set of related software functionalities that can be reused for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage.
OASIS defines service as "a mechanism to enable access to one or more capabilities, where the access is provided using a prescribed interface and is exercised consistent with constraints and policies as specified by the service description."
An enterprise architecture team will develop the organization's service model first by defining the top level business functions. Once the business functions are defined, they are further sectioned into services that represent the processes and activities needed to manage the assets of the organization in their various states. One example is the separation of the business function "Manage Orders" into services such as "Create Order," "Fulfill Order," "Ship Order," "Invoice Order" and "Cancel/Update Order."