Collaboration is a fundamental concept in terms of developing and driving innovative solutions. This will thus ensure the wide diffusion and effective promotion of ideas and projects results to the target audience. Major collaboration activities are based on sharing complementary goals, philosophy, purpose and best practices in order to achieve and effectively exploit common results from a technical point of view and improve overall visibility of project results in terms of dissemination.
SOA4All collaboration has been very active during the entire project, and the project Consortium got the achievements by addressing mainly the following projects and initiatives.
NEXOF-RA
Collaboration between SOA4All and NEXOF-RA (http://www.nexof-ra.eu) focuses on the exploitation of technical synergies through the SOA4All contribution to the Open Construction Process of NEXOF-RA, in terms of the Invitations to Contributes as well as the Architecture Board Meetings. In addition, SOA4All also contributes at the technical level by providing terms for the NEXOF-RA glossary. SOA4All has participated to the First Invitation to Contribute, in particular to the Core Service Framework Area concerning the Service Description Techniques and the Design Time Service Composition topics. On one hand, SOA4All has submitted a position paper about „Service Description Technology Lightweight Service Semantics and Annotations Common for WSDL and RESTful Web Services“.
The 2nd Invitation to Contribute, launched in February 2009, regarding the Core Service Framework area, SOA4All submitted two papers: one based on the execution engine (runtime composition topic) and one based on the light-weight process modeling language. SOA4All continued joining the Architecture Board meetings until the end of the project, and the main contribution was to the Open Reference Model and the Open Reference Architecture.
The Future Internet Initiative
To date major collaboration actions between the SOA4All project and the Future Internet Assembly (http://www.future-internet.eu) has been based on the technical exploitation of synergies as well as on the dissemination activities. At technical level, SOA4All participates to the Software and services cluster at the Future Internet Assembly. In terms of joint dissemination, SOA4All in collaboration with other 63 European Research projects and the European Technology platforms, eMobility, NEM, NESSI, ISI and EPOSS, have signed the Bled declaration.
Atos Origin has included SOA4All results in the Future Internet Core Platform developed in the FIWARE project. In particular, semi-assisted process modelling features developed in SOA4All will be reused and extended. Atos is planning to complement mashup and business process modelling solutions included in FIWARE CP with semi-assisted process modelling features provided by the SOA4All Design Time Composer (DTC). DTC will rely on semantic services and process descriptions stored within a metadata repository such as SOA4All iServe.
Future Internet Architecture Working Group
Since late 2010, SOA4All contributes via expert consultations to the Future Internet Architecture (FIArch) Working Group. The FIArch Experts Reference Group’s main activity is currently in identifying and categorizing “Fundamental Limitations of Current Internet” technology. The limitations’ document focuses on a few key architectural issues, which are shared and agreed by the representatives of the working group, including various FP7 projects with the aim to contribute to an EC research roadmap towards Future Internet Architecture. The contributions of SOA4All to the group and the document were channeled via the FP7 CSA (Coordination and Support Action) project SOFI whose goal is to complement EU R&D projects in the area of Internet of Services, Software and Virtualisation (Objective 1.2) through specific support activities
W3C USDL Incubator Group
In September 2010 the USDL Incubator Group (XG) was initiated by Attensity, DFKI, SAP, and Siemens, later joined by the Open University. Its mission statement is given on http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/usdl/charter as follows: “The mission of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to define a language for describing general and generic parts of technical and business services to allow services to become tradable and consumable.“
The recommendation of SOA4All to the USDL XG was to investigate the established Web architecture and standards (languages, protocols and technologies) and to re-use existing service description vocabularies (e.g., from SOA4All) and existing ontologies for describing things like time, location or contracts. Concrete actions coming from this collaboration are the preparation of an RDFS version of large parts of USDL, and the participation of various SOA4All experts in the USDL XG . Although, the USDL meta-model is formally defined in Ecore (the meta-modeling language of EMF), SOA4All is working on bringing the service description language closer to Web standards.
COIN
Starting from notable research results in the field of enterprise interoperability and collaboration, COIN (http://www.coin-ip.eu) will develop a baseline and innovative services for supporting various collaborative business forms, from supply chains to business ecosystems. As a result, COIN will offer a business-pervasive open source service platform that will be able to expose, integrate, compose, and mash-up, in a secure and adaptive way, existing and innovative Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration services.
The relationship between COIN and SOA4All has been present since the beginning of the two projects, being SOA4All a representative project of the service layer from a very technology-driven perspective, and being COIN the flagship project of service collaboration and interoperability and thus looking at the service layer from the viewpoint of enterprise systems.
A COIN GSDP (Generic Service Delivery Platform) which is an open source instantiation of a generic SESA (Semantically Enabled Service Architecture, namely WSMX), specialized in the EI/EC domain, and empowered with advanced capabilities for trust & security, distribution & scalability, reasoning and negotiation. Open University is now investigating whether iServe can be connected to above such that Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration services described in iServe can be discovered by the COIN GSDP.
S-Cube
The SOA4All project and the S-Cube Network of Excellence (http://www.s-cube-network.eu) have different nature and can be seen as complementary initiatives. S-Cube in fact focuses on long-term research and on promoting the development of an integrated and multidisciplinary community, whereas SOA4All focuses on the specific case studies proposed by industrial partners by adopting a practical approach. Therefore collaboration between S-Cube and SOA4All cannot be related to the reuse of software solutions, prototypes etc. On the contrary, collaboration mainly takes place at the dissemination level.
Collaboration between S-Cube and SOA4All led to various joint position papers.
NetChallenge
SOA4All has exchanged information and ideas with the EU NetChallenge project wolfriverlodge.com (http://www.netchallenge.org). European SMEs will have to adopt new business models and to establish dynamic and non-hierarchical networks to respond to market opportunities, assuring quick response, fast time to market, differentiated offerings and competitive prices. Sustainability for SMEs will be found in high-variety low-volume businesses, related with complex products manufacturing.
SOA4All and NetChallenge participants have met in order to examine how SOA4All tools may be used in the NetChallenge project to define service based processes in non-hierarchical industry networks. It is proposed to use some of the SOA4All tools for service composition and consumption allowing NetChallenge to connect the different sub-components of the project
LarKC
The FP7 Integrated Project LarKC project, Large Knowledge Collider (http://www.larkc.eu), aims at developing a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web. The LarKC platform is an open-source realization of an experimentation infrastructure for interleaving search methods with inductive and deductive reasoning.
Collaboration has focused on improving the wsml2reasoner framework and in particular the IRIS datalog engine. LarKC is now working on a parallelized reasoning implementation of IRIS termed ParIRIS for the rule-based reasoning that profits from a MapReduce approach. The goal is to come up with a fully Web-enable RIF-BLD reasoner; in this respect LarKC also extends the work on RIF4J that was partly done in scope of SOA4All.
Resonance
Resonance (http://www.willyouhelp.co.uk) is a multi-platform broadcasting project which aims to create a new Sci-Fi series to be broadcast on TV, published as a graphic novel and also facilitate ambitious forms audience engagement – allowing the audience to create new characters and plot lines.
Resonance is centered on the outcomes of the SOA4All project where we are exploring how Linked Data and Web Services can enable a „semantic data track“ for broadcast media to complement the existing video and audio tracks. It is envisaged that the creation of this new layer will enable the connection of disparate heterogeneous resources and support audience engagement.
THESEUS/TEXO
TEXO (http://www.theseus-programm.de/en-us/theseus-application-scenarios/texo/) is a research project, within the THESEUS research program initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi), that is coordinated by SAP Karlsruhe. The main goal of THESEUS is the development of a new Internet-based infrastructure in order to improve both the usability and practicability of knowledge available on the Internet. Within the THESEUS program, TEXO works towards novel service economies by creating infrastructure components for the Internet of Services; with a focus on business aspects. To this end, the task of TEXO is to provide a platform that makes services tradable on the Internet, composable into value-added services, and allows for the integration of customized services into the environment of service consumers.
The recommendation of SOA4All to the USDL team was to take a very good look at the established Web architecture and standards (languages, protocols and technologies) and to re-use existing service description vocabularies (e.g., from SOA4All) and existing ontologies for describing things like time, location or contracts. Concrete actions coming from this collaboration are the preparation of an RDFS version of large parts of USDL, and the participation of various SOA4All experts in the USDL XD.
STASIS
The joint collaboration between STASIS (http://www.stasis-project.net) and SOA4All has involved the exchange of information between the developers of the SOA4All semantic spaces and the STASIS Semantic Registry and Repository Network as well as several meetings attended between the developer teams for exchanging information and discussing technical collaborations. Besides the technical collaboration, some joint dissemination has been done in terms of increasing the visibility of both projects by including STASIS and SOA4All logos on both websites.
Other dissemination actions cover the organization of the Semantic Week 2009, an event to increase the base of users and companies that are interested in applying STASIS and SOA4All technologies in real world projects.
NESSI
The collaboration between SOA4All and the Networked European Software and Services Initiative (http://www.nessi-europe.eu) focused at the communication level and was aimed at setting up a bi-directional channel to ensure that the NESSI community was aware of the SOA4All advances and, specifically, of its contributions to NEXOF, as well as that the SOA4All partners were aware of NESSI advances. As such, NESSI was a major contributor to SOA4All’s awareness efforts. In this context, NESSI contributed to the promotion of the SOA4All ideas and evolution by:
- Organizing communication meetings for all NSPs used to define common activities and actively share dissemination opportunities
- Including SOA4All in NESSIs communication channels
- Organizing events for targeted (SOA4All) or collaborative (all NESSI Strategic Projects) sessions
CHOReOS
The FP7 project CHOReOS – Large Scale Choreographies for the Future Internet (http://www.choreos.eu) will implement a framework for scalable choreography development. The goal is to enable domain experts to develop decentralized ultra-large scale (ULS) solutions composed of heterogeneous services that are adaptable and QoS (Quality-of-Service) aware.
A joint SOA4All-CHOReOS collaboration session took place in April 2011. The goal of the meeting was to illustrate and foster usage of SOA4All tools and solutions, collecting valuable feedback from CHOReOS partners.