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Service Engineering
Welcome to the homepage of Service Engineering, one of the key research areas in the unit.
The word "service" means different things to different people. While a general definition is that a service is useful labour that does not produce a tangible commodity, within the context of this report we are interested in services that are mainly delivered by software.
A useful definition from the ICSOC 2005 conference is that services are autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols for the purpose of building networks of collaborating applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries.
The unit D3 "Software Technologies" is stimulating research projects that prepare the ground for new types of end-user service economies where innovative players (emerging service SMEs, telecom operators, even individuals) have the software infrastructure and tools to easily create and deploy new types of services. In order to offer unprecedented opportunities for European society, research should result in the development of services that are
- simple to use with a high perceived value
- adaptive to the situation and environment
- providing intelligent support while leaving the user in control
- provided transparently through different infrastructures and devices.
What is new?
- An informal workshop "At your service" will be organised in Brussels on June 27 in Brussels. The aims of this workshop are:
- (1) Sharing project results through demonstrations;
- (2) Introducing the projects to NESSI (a technology platform working in this area), possibly leading to future links between the projects and NESSI;
- (3) Introducing the projects to ICSOC (an international conference on Service Oriented Computing) with a view to increasing the visibility of the FP6 efforts on services research.
- NESSI, the technology platform on software and services has published their strategic research agenda
- The ICSOC community has published a roadmap for service computing research.
- With the help of the participants of the "Future Service Engineering" event a new version of the document "The service engineering area: an overview of its current state and a vision of its future" has been developed. This will become part of a printed publication.
The first version (with more information about the projects) is available here.
Past activities
- A meeting on "Future service engineering" has been organised in Brussels (November 10, 2005) as part of an ongoing activity to refine research priorities. Focussed on the area of Service engineering, it is intended to support discussions with the community in order to identify key research challenges in service engineering and important areas for FP7.
- July 12 there was a concertation meeting for running FP6 projects, with a parallel session for the service engineering related projects. Standardization is an aim of most of projects in this area, and will therefore be an important topic of this session. The WSMO initiative was explained and W3C provided an overview of the current activities related to web services and the semantic web.
- Workshop and Info Day for the strategic objective "Software and Services". The event took place in Brussels on 21st-22nd April 2005. The workshop included a specific session on service engineering, discussing its main, medium and long term research challenges. The workshop was followed by an Info Day where experts presented their proposal ideas.
A number of relevant reports may be found on the "reports" section.
Contact:
Charles Macmillan
Contact Form
Tel: +32-2-29-88885
Anne-Marie Sassen
Contact Form
Tel: +32-2-29-57923