SEE Unit - Projects

“By 2020 enterprise collaboration and interoperability services will become an invisible, pervasive and self-adaptive knowledge and business utility at disposal of the European networked enterprises from any industrial sector and domain in order to rapidly set-up, efficiently manage and effectively operate different forms of business collaborations, from the most traditional supply chains to the most advanced and dynamic business ecosystems.” The mission of the COIN IP is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support the above 2020 vision. COIN business-pervasive open-source service platform will be able to expose, integrate, compose and mash-up in a secure and adaptive way existing and innovative to-bedeveloped Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration services, by applying intelligent maturity models, business rules and self-adaptive decision-support guidelines to guarantee the best combination of the needed services in dependence of the business context, as industrial sector and domain, size of the companies involved, openness and dynamics of collaboration. This way, the Information Technology vision of Software as a Service (SaaS) will find its implementation in the field of interoperability among collaborative enterprises, supporting the various collaborative business forms, from supply chains to business ecosystems, and becoming for them like a utility, a commodity, the so-called Interoperability Service Utility (ISU). The COIN project will finally develop an original business model based on the SaaS-U (Software as a Service-Utility) paradigm where the open-source COIN service platform will be able to integrate both free-of-charge and chargeable, open and proprietary services depending on the case and business policies.

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 ofenterprise systems based on Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous Architectures(SHA). SHA extends service-oriented architecture (SOA) with semantics andheterogeneous 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-supportedmethodology. SHAPE will take an active role in the standardization ofmetamodels and languages for SHA. The technical results will be compliantwith the proposed standards to ensure high industry acceptance. In current SOA approaches, business requirements and technical details areintertwined constraining the evolution of service-oriented businesssolutions. SHAPE will provide metamodels and languages, methods and tools toseparate the different viewpoints of SOA for the development ofsemantically-enabled, flexible and adaptive business services on a rich SHAinfrastructure.

The e-Freight project is aimed at supporting, from a transport perspective, the three pillars of European Policy namely:

• Strengthening of the internal market and competitiveness;
• Improving regulation to create a more dynamic business environment;
• Promoting sustainable development.

Specifically e-Freight will contribute to the goals of the Freight transport Logistics Action Plan (Oct 2007), and ITS Action Plan (Oct 2008) pertaining to the development of:

1. A standard framework for freight information exchange covering all transport modes and all stakeholders.
2. A European Single Transport Document for carriage of goods with all the necessary legislative support,
   irrespective of mode.
3. A Single Window (single access point) for administrative procedures in all modes.
4. Simple, harmonised border crossings procedures for all modes of transport for all EU member states.
5. Simple procedures and the necessary infrastructure for establishing secure and efficient transport corridors between Europe, USA, and Asia.

Consumers increasingly buy products through the Internet, but they lack assistance for searching the “right” product. Recommender systems address this problem by asking targeted questions. The success (or failure) of such a recommendation process is defined in terms of conversion rate or click-out rate. It is very difficult to predict improvements for given changes of the recommendation process, however, and manual changes are usually very expensive.

Therefore, SOFAR ("Semantics and Ontologies for Feedback-driven Adapting Recommender Systems") proposes automated adaptations of recommendation processes making use of semantic technology. The approach makes Internet content accessible for searching products.

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.