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After four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly artificial intelligence. Emerging technologies as the Semantic Web and Web services transform the Internet from an information network into a network of knowledgeable services, this trend being supported by major technology vendors as well as established standardization bodies. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. Hence there is a need for novel mechanisms for searching them, and service frameworks which allow these services to be used in innovative applications and business models. In this context machine-processable semantics is seen as one of the major instruments to cope with certain limitations at societal, economical and technological level. The overall mission of the SARIT is foster the Semantically Enabled Service Oriented Architecture (SESA) revolution on a world-wide scale. We will coordinate and organize a comprehensive training program dedicated to the field of Semantic Web Services (SWS), including a Semantic Web Services retreat, seminars, workshops and tutorials for researchers and professionals. SARIT will be a joint initiative of STI International and STI-Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck.

The mission of the Service Bundler project is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive and generic SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) integrated platform with its primary research focus on composition and monitoring of services. We will develop a Service Bundler business-pervasive platform that will enable to integrate, compose and expose in a secure and adaptive way innovative services. This will be done by applying business rules and self-adaptive decision-support guidelines to guarantee the best combination of the needed services by taking into account the business context. The role of the Service Bundler project would be to provide a set of core technologies for the base seekda Service Platform. We aim to allow the use of abstract process templates – enabling the composition of available Web Services – such that, with the support of a monitoring mechanism, they can be executed consecutively without any user interaction in-between. Even if some of these services would not perform as initially expected, these should remain transparent to the end user. From an external perspective, such a composition (or bundle as we call it in this proposal) of services would act like one service, offering a specific eCommerce functionality. The fact that this functionality is only reached after executing multiple services should be hidden behind seekda’s platform.

The goal of Service-Detective is thus to overcome shortcomings of current Web Service search engines by:

• Employing automated methods to gather Web Services and related resources.
• Leveraging automatic means to create semantic service descriptions from information available on the Web.
• Describing the aggregated information in semantic models and allowing reasoning over it.
• Building meaningful clusters of the collected services and of search results.

The Service-Detective project will deliver a search engine that enables users to find up-to- date information on available Web Services. It will employ automated crawling, information retrieval methods and analysis techniques and shall be able to scale with the increasing number of services, as this approach does not rely on a central editorial team that would necessarily become a bottleneck once the number of deployed services reaches Web scale. Consequently, the approaches developed by Service-Detective can adapt quickly to changes in terms of the available services. The search engine will leverage available information exposed by current technologies and extend this information with semantic annotations to allow for more accurate retrieval. It will use the service information to enable efficient clustering and matchmaking of services, in view of the goal to provide an efficient discovery and clustered search possibility for Web Services.

Even after four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly intelligent applications. Emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web or Web Services transform the Internet from a network of information to a network of knowledge and services. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. It is the mission of Service Web 3.0 to address these emerging developments and contribute to the implementation of framework programmes and their projects, and support the preparation of future community research and technological development. The focus of Service Web 3.0 will be to:

• Create, maintain, and publish roadmaps as a means to plan and coordinate framework and community activities for a future service world.
• Set-up of dedicated cross-project clusters focusing on Semantic Web Services within STI International.
• Provide information material such as white papers, feasibility studies, promotional movies for raising the awareness for the technology in industry, introducing new business models and systematically facilitating Semantic Web Services and Semantic Web technology adoption, in particular for SMEs.
• Support standardization activities for semantic service descriptions.
• Exploit synergies through networking and cross-fertilization with other research and network projects related to this area.
• Organize special focused conferences and seminars.

Service Web 3.0 will pave the way to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology.

Modelling is an integrated part of software engineering approaches. Business process models are widely used to describe how work is done within an organization, while various product models describe what is done. Various approaches based on model-driven engineering (MDE) concepts, such as the OMG MDA (Model Driven Architecture) and related efforts around domain-specific languages have gained much popularity. Business models are described in the computation-independent models (CIMs) while for the product models, the model-driven approach separates platform-independent models (PIMs) from the platform-specific ones (PSMs) in order to abstract the implementation technologies. The objective of SHAPE is to support the development and the realization of enterprise systems based on Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous Architectures(SHA). SHA extends service-oriented architecture (SOA) with semantics and heterogeneous infrastructures (Web services, agents, Semantic Web Services,P2P and grid) under a unified service-oriented approach. SHAPE will develop a model-driven engineering (MDE) tool-supported methodology. SHAPE will take an active role in the standardization of metamodels and languages for SHA. The technical results will be compliant with the proposed standards to ensure high industry acceptance. In current SOA approaches, business requirements and technical details are intertwined constraining the evolution of service-oriented business solutions. SHAPE will provide metamodels and languages, methods and tools to separate the different viewpoints of SOA for the development of semantically-enabled, flexible and adaptive business services on a rich SHA-infrastructure.

The mission of the present SEEMP (Single European Employment Market-Place) proposal is: to design and implement in a prototypal way an interoperability architecture for public e-Employment services which encompasses cross-governmental business and decisional processes, interoperability and reconciliation of local professional profiles and taxonomies, semantically enabled web services for distributed knowledge access and sharing. In particular, the SEEMP project will develop an EIF-compliant federated architecture and interoperability middleware as well as applicative plug-in services to allow existing National/Local job market places and data warehouses to be interoperable at pan-European level by overcoming state-of-the-art limitations.

The emerging generation starts by abstracting from software and sees all resources as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In a world of services, it is the service that counts for a customer and not the software or hardware components which implement the service. Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. A service Web will have billions of services. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing by abstracting from the underlying hardware and software layers, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges that SOA does not address today. SOA4All will help to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology.   The outcome of the project will be a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary and revolutionary technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform:

• Web principles and technology as the underlying infrastructure for the integration of services at a world wide scale.
• Web 2.0 as a means to structure human-machine cooperation in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
• Semantic Web technology as a means to abstract from syntax to semantics as
  required for meaningful service discovery.
• Context management as a way to process in a machine understandable way user needs that facilitates the customization of existing services for the needs of users.

  SOA4All will significantly impact the competitiveness of the European Software and IT Services industry and more widely to address the Lisbon goals. For that purpose SOA4All will use the support of the NESSI constituency and will contribute significantly to the NESSI Open Framework, which is one of the main challenges of the European Platform on Software and Services. It has a consortium of 16 partners and led by Atos Origin.

S-Cube, the Software Services and Systems Network, will establish an integrated, multidisciplinary, vibrant research community which will enable Europe to lead the software-services revolution, thereby helping shape the software-service based Internet which is the backbone of our future interactive society.   An integration of research expertise and an intense collaboration of researchers in the field of software services and systems are needed to address the following key problems:  

• Research fragmentation: Current research activities are fragmented and each research community (e.g., grid computing or software engineering) concentrates mostly on its own specific techniques, mechanisms and methodologies. As a result the proposed solutions are not aligned with or influenced by activities in related research fields.
• Future Challenges: One challenge, as an example, is to build service-based systems in such a way that they can self-adapt while guaranteeing the expected level of service quality. Such an adaptation can be required due to changes in a system’s environment or in response to predicted and unpredicted problems.