ServiceWave 2008

Open Alliance on Service Front-Ends: Developing Technologies, Tools and Vision that will Enable User-Services Interactions in the Future Internet of Services.

Description

Future Internet will involve a paradigm shift that manifests itself by the evolution of business models from the sale of products to the provision of electronic services. Ultimately, this will mean transforming the Internet to service the daily life of citizens, businesses and organizations. Experience shows that acceptance of many tools and systems depends on how interaction with the final user is resolved. In the same way, the success of this new paradigm shift will depend very much on how user/service interactions are carried out, meaning the capability to:

  • Adapt and assist user/service interaction depending on the user context (profile, preferences, social network it belongs to) and the delivery context (device used for access, geographical and time location, connection bandwidth)
  • Enable users to share their knowledge and setup their own workspace web access point through which interaction with available services will be managed

Development of technologies and tools that leverage these capabilities is the challenge addressed by the proposed Workshop.The Open Alliance on Service Front Ends (http://sfe.morfeo-project.org/) was publicly announced during the September 2008 Collaboration Days organised by the SSAI unit the European Commission. Starting from a concrete vision about how the future Service Web Front-Ends should be, the alliance will help to set up an effective collaboration schema targeted to deliver open specifications and open source reference implementation of the necessary software components that will allow the materialization of this vision.This Workshop intends to advance the activities of the Open Alliance on Service Front-Ends and provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in User-Service Interaction Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on current and emerging related topics, including service mashups, mashup platforms, gadget development tools, mashupable user interfaces, global SOA, an so on. Workshop attendants will exchange ideas and experiences, establish common ground in research areas or practical problems, and identify opportunities for collaboration towards the implementation of key technologies in this area under an open source scheme. Preference will be given to timely topics that will favor highly interactive discussions.Organization of this workshop currently involves partners of different projects including the EU FP7 FAST Project (http://fast.morfeo-project.eu/), the EzWeb Project (a NESSI Strategic Project,http://ezweb.morfeo-project.org) and the Eureka-CELTIC MyMobileWeb project (http://mymobileweb.morfeo-project.org). This joint organization effort will concretely involve companies such as Telefónica I+D or SAP AG, members of the academia such as Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, National University of Ireland – Galway/DERI, University of Kassel or the Technical University of Vienna as well as research and technological institutes such as the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) in Italy or the Center for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies (CTIC) in Spain. The workshop would fit within activities of the EU SSAI Service Front-Ends Collaboration Working Group chaired by EC FP7 FAST project as well as the NESSI User Service Front-end Working Group (http://www.nessi-europe.com/Nessi/WorkingGroups/HorizontalWorkingGroups/UserServicesInteractions/tabid/247/Default.aspx).

Proposed Workshop Format

The workshop will be organized around a Poster Session including 5 to 7 simultaneous posters, a Tutorial/Demo Session that will take about 2 1/2 hours, followed by a number of parallel slots for in-depth technical discussion, each one will last 1/2 hour and will be focused on a different project amongst those included in the Poster Session, and a 3 hours Panel Session fostering the interaction of the workshop attendees and the members of the organizing project consortia and Working Groups, which includes a final round table.This workshop proposes a Poster Session to provide an interaction opportunity for parties involved in ongoing research projects related to user-service interaction to present and demonstrate their new and innovative work-in-progress and to obtain feedback from their peers in an informal setting. It will give conference attendees a forum where they can learn about novel on-going research projects that are not yet completed, but whose preliminary results will be adopted as basis for future work carried out by the Open Alliance on Service Front Ends. It also provides poster presenters with an excellent opportunity to receive invaluable feedback from knowledgeable sources. For the time being, we already have the commitment of the coordinators of the following projects to present posters:

The Tutorial/Demo Session on Service Mashups entitled Service Mashups: Putting a face on the Future Internet of Services. The central topic of the proposed tutorial/demo will be presented to the audience with two major parts, theory and practice. The theory part will last 1/2 hour and includes the motivation, the necessary definition of important terms and concepts and also an overview of the state of the art with regard to current approaches of mashup platforms and development tools. A comprehensive argumentation and presentation of the requirements towards the realization of an Enterprise Mashup platform and a Gadget Development Environmnet linked to an innovative Gadget Development Methodology completes this part. During the practical part of the tutorial, which will last 2 hour and a half), demonstrations of major existing platforms that allow users to create service Mashups will be given. The presenters will give a demonstration with a full-fledged working version of EzWeb (an Enterprise Mashup platform) and MyMobileWeb (a Mobile Web Platform capable of executing EzWeb Mashups), as well as with a first prototype of the FAST Gadget Development Environment. This will help increasing the impact of the proposed Posters Session and vice versa. Finally, a practical scenario will be presented that demonstrates the value of an Enterprise Mashup platform in a large enterprise.The tutorial/demo is targeted to a broad audience of (but not limited to) people with a research or industrial background and interest in the following topics:

  • Enterprise Mashups
  • Service Front Ends
  • User-Service Interaction
  • End-user driven service/resource Mashup
  • Piping and wiring of Web Resources
  • Enterprise 2.0
  • Next-generation SOA
  • Internet of Services

This track includes a number parallel 1 hour slots for in-depth technical discussion, each one focused on a different project amongst those included in the Poster Session. This track will help members of project consortiums leading the Future Internet of Services vision to network the latter results achieved in their ongoing work.A previous successful release of this tutorial took place during the 8th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2007, http://wise2007.loria.fr/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Tutorial) under the title Enterprise Mashup: Putting a face on next generation global SOAThe Panel Session will represent an excellent forum to present the Open Alliance for Service Front Ends vision paper (working draft available here) as well as its related agenda and roadmap. It will also represent an excellent forum for both academics and industry to come together and take this agenda forward. The Panel Session will ultimately represent a great opportunity for participants to discuss technical issues, exchange research ideas, and to develop community in this quickly emerging field. In particular it will cover the following topics:

  • Advanced user interaction with services.
  • Models of information describing context and standard APIs/protocols to access context information
  • Definition of suitable user representation models combined with semantic descriptions of business domains, contexts and processes.
  • Advanced declarative abstract user interface definition languages and tools enabling user interface development by composition and configuration.
  • Environments supporting multimodal/multidevice interaction with services.
  • Methods and tools for the definition and composition of personalised user interfaces by human end users. (by composing pre-existing building blocks)
  • Enhance personalized user interfaces in a collaborative manner or by social communities based on suggestions made by automatic agents.
  • Technologies and tools that help exploiting social intelligence to foster the mashup development process.

The ultimate objective of this panel session will be to take a step forward in setting up an open global alliance aimed to effectively deliver:

  • A common vision on the technologies and architecture associated to Service Front Ends in the future Internet of Services
  • Open specifications and, potentially, open source reference implementations of components in the envisioned architecture

The Panel Session will include a 1 hour final round table.

Workshop Organizers

The workshop will be jointly organized by partners of the EzWeb NESSI Strategic Project, the EU FP7 FAST Project and the EU CELTIC MyMobileWeb project and is supported by both the User-Services Interaction Working Group at NESSI and the Service Front-End Collaboration Working Group setup by the EC SSAI Unit. People in charge of the organization follows:

  • Mr. Juan José (Juanjo) Hierro (Telefónica I+D, E-Mail: jhierro_at_tid.es). Mr. Hierro has been recently promoted to the position of CTO on Software Technologies at Telefónica I+D. He leads a cluster of projects dealing with R&D activities on software and services technologies. Some of the EU FP projects linked to this cluster are: NEXOF-RA, Reservoir, SLA@SOI, FAST, BREIN, Qualipso, NESSI-Soft, NESSI-Grid, Shadows and OGF-Europe. The cluster also includes some relevant R&D projects funded by the Spanish Avanza Program such as EzWeb (also labeled as NESSI Strategic Project), MyMobileWeb (also labeled as Eureka CELTIC project) or VULCANO. In addition, open source initiatives, particularly the OSS Community Morfeo where he keeps the role of chairman, will be part of the cluster. He also participates in activities linked to the Service Front End Collaboration WG and, in particular, those related to definition and development of the Service Front End Open Alliance. One of the objectives in his new position has to do with a strong involvement and technical lead of relevant areas trying to push forward a new vision on the future Internet of Services and next-generation SOA. In this particular respect, he has taken the lead of the WG related to the Future Internet of Services at the Spanish Technology Platform INES and plays an active role in the Spanish Technology Platform recently created on the subject of the Future of Internet leaded by Telefónica. Last but not least, Juanjo also continues being the representative of Telefónica in the NESSI Steering Committee.
  • Dr. Javier Soriano (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, E-Mail: jsoriano_at_fi.upm.es). Dr. Soriano is Associate Professor of Computer Science with a focus on Computer Networks and Internet/Web technologies. He leads the Computer Networks and Web Technologies Lab (CoNWeT Lab) at the UPM School of Computer Science, where he is in charge of a number of relevant european research projects dealing with services, including FAST (EC FP7 Project, ICT Challenge 1.2: Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering), EzWeb (labeled as NESSI Strategic Project), MyMobileWeb (labeled as Eureka CELTIC Project and distinguised as a flagship project by the CELTIC Cluster). He is involved in the development of the vision of the future Internet of Services through his active participation in the WG related to the Future Internet of Services at the Spanish Technology Platform INES (Spanish Software and Services Initiative) and in the Spanish Technology Platform recently created on the subject of the Future of Internet (es.Internet) that will be co-chaired by UPM. He is also actively involved in NESSI (UPM is member of the NESSI Steering Committee), having contributed to the development of its Strategic Research Agenda. He is now also involved in the Future Internet Assembly, as the UPM representative for FAST, as well as in the work being done by the Service Front-End Collaboration Working Group (EC FP7).
  • Dr. Schahram Dustdar (Vienna University of Technology, E-mail: dustdar_at_infosys.tuwien.ac.at). Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science with a focus on Internet Technologies heading the Distributed Systems Group, Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) where he is director of the Vita Lab. He is also Honorary Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Groningen (RuG), The Netherlands. He is Chair of the IFIP Working Group 6.4 on Internet Applications Engineering and a founding member of the Scientific Academy of Service Technology. Currently he has 8 active EU projects and is coordinator of FP-6 project inContext and FP-7 project COMPAS.
  • Dr. Fabio Paternò (ISTI-CNR, E-mail: fabio.paterno_at_isti.cnr.it). Fabio is Research Director and Head of the Laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systemsat ISTI-CNR. His current research interests include Migratory Interfaces, Methods and Tools for Multimodal User Interface Design and Evaluation, Accessibility, User Interfaces for Mobile Devices, Model-Based Design of Interactive Systems, End-User Development, and Design of User Interfaces for Safety Critical Interactive Systems. He has published over one hundred-seventy papers in refereed international conferences or journals. He is also the author of the book on Model-Based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Applications (widely cited in scientific literature). He has been the scientific coordinator of five EU projects ( MEFISTO, GUITARE, EUD-Net, CAMELEON, OPEN) and one of the main investigators in several others (such as ADVISES, MAUSE, SIMILAR, SERVFACE). He has been member of the Programme Committee of the main international HCI conferences, including Papers Co-Chair of the ACM CHI 2000 conference , IFIP INTERACT 2003 and IFIP INTERACT 2005. He chaired the fourth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices (September 2002). He represents Italy in the IFIP Technical Committee 13 on Human Computer Interaction, he is member of IFIP WG 2.7 and WG 13.2.

Workshop Expected Duration

4 hours, distributed as follows: The Tutorial/Demo Session will last 2 1/2 hours, followed by a number parallel slots for in-depth technical discussion, each one focused on a different project amongst those included in the Poster Session, that will last 1/2 hour maximum. This will be followed by the Panel Session, that will last 3 hours including a final round table. The Poster Session will take place simultaneously.

Links to ongoing research projects being developed by the organizers

Some other EU FP projects linked to this consortium are: Reservoir (http://www.reservoir-fp7.eu/), SLA@SOI (http://www.sla-at-soi.eu/), BREIN (http://www.eu-brein.com/), Qualipso (http://www.qualipso.org/), NESSI-Soft (http://www.nessi-europe.com/Nessi/Projects/SupportingProjects/NESSISoft/Information/tabid/237/Default.aspx9), NESSI-Grid (http://www.nessi-europe.com/Nessi/Projects/SupportingProjects/NESSIGrid/Information/tabid/234/Default.aspx), Shadows (https://sysrun.haifa.il.ibm.com/shadows/) and OGF-Europe (http://www.ogfeurope.eu/). The list also includes some relevant R&D projects funded by the Spanish Avanza Program such as VULCANO (http://ines.org.es/vulcano) or PRIMA(http://prima.morfeo-project.org). In addition, open source initiatives, particularly the OSS Community Morfeo (http://morfeo-project.org) where the proposers develop the role of co-chairs in its board.

The Workshop leaflet can be downloaded here

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