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SOA4All has already started to collaborate with some NESSI Strategic Projects, in particular NEXOF-RA and SLA@SOI. NEXOF-RACollaboration 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".
Some of the planned actions to be done in the short term will consist of continuing collaborating to the Open Construction Process by participating to the 2nd Invitation to Contribute, launched in February 2009 regarding the Core Service Framework area in terms of submitting two papers: one based on the execution engine (runtime composition topic) and one based on the light-weight process modeling language. SLA@SOIThe scope of the SLA@SOI project (http://www.sla-at-soi.eu) is the definition, negotiation, and monitoring of SLAs between various layers of a service infrastructure. Such topics are not investigated in SOA4All. On the other hand, SLA@SOI focuses only marginally on service composition design and execution, which is a main goal in SOA4All. Thus the two projects can be seen as highly complementary. SOA4All has contributed to the SLA@SOI project by compiling a survey on requirements for their management framework (sent on January 30th, 2009). The goal of such survey has been in fact to collect requirements for a framework for (semi-)automatic management of services, on the basis of formally specified SLAs. Requirements have been organized in categories, divided in three groups: conceptual and/or informational models for SLA based management, functionalities of a SLA based management framework, and architecture of a SLA based management framework.
In addition, the following related projects have been contacted in order to plan collaboration activities. S-CubeThe 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. COINStarting 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. At this stage of COIN, the results produced are the following:
Although the COIN baseline platform could provide interesting inputs for improving the SOA4All platform, its integration would be very difficult, since the components are expected to work in a concrete context. On the other hand, the baseline services may be an interesting collaboration point, since both SOA4All and COIN could share the basic services developed in each project. STASISThe 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. In addition, some planned dissemination actions in the short term will cover the Semantic Week organized by the STASIS object. The aim is to provide an open platform that allows the projects to increase the awareness of both projects and to increase the base of users and companies that are interested in applying the technologies in real world projects. NESSIThe collaboration between SOA4All and the Networked European Software and Services Initiative (http://www.nessi-europe.eu) focuses at the communication level and it is aimed at setting up a bi-directional channel to ensure that the NESSI community is aware of the SOA4All advances and, specifically, its contributions to NEXOF as well as that the SOA4All partners are aware of NESSI advances. As such, NESSI is a major contributor to SOA4All’s awareness efforts. In this context, NESSI contributes to the promotion of the SOA4All ideas and evolution by:
The Future Internet InitiativeTo 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. Some planned actions for the short term include attending the next Future Internet Assembly that will take place next May 2009 in Prague. This conference will mark the progress made on the commitments taken by European funded projects when signing the Bled declaration, and to secure other bold cooperation agreements across key players world-wide. LarKCLarKC (http://www.larkc.eu) and SOA4All are in the process of aligning their results. Both of these projects in fact reached a stage at which the first results are becoming available and it is timely to identify those activities where collaboration will be mutually beneficial, most likely involving technology sharing and standardisation efforts. A joint workshop took place in September 2009, whose goal was to reach a better mutual understanding of research goals and to take concrete steps to ensure a closer cooperation for the coming years. |
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.
