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Manifesto
Building the Front End of the future Internet of Services
Service Front End Open Alliance
Date: 12-05-2009
Version 1.0 (PDF)
1. Problem statement
Electronic Services have evolved over time as a key driver for the transformation of businesses into e-businesses. Today, there are thousands of electronic services accessible on the Web. The emergence of many of these services has to do with the development of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications, which many companies and organizations started to implement and continue evolving. Recently, new tools supporting users to generate content and services have experienced a remarkable development as part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Services available on the Web have multiplied in the recent years and the success of most popular search engines is tightly linked to their ability to help users in finding Content/Data as well as Application Services in a very intuitive way. However, there are still a number of questions that remain unresolved.
First, users do not have tools that facilitate the integration of available services into applications that effectively support their daily processes. Indeed, users have to access multiple web portals scattered throughout the web even when they carry out the easiest processes. Additionally the users have to navigate through each portal until reaching the service they are looking for and then transfer relevant information from one web portal to another. Often this is done through manual copying and pasting on the computer clipboard. Thus, users have to take the role of an application integration tool, which does currently not exist.
Third, users do not have tools that enable them to share the processes they have implemented with other users or the experience gained about what services to compose and how.
Finally, trying to evolve towards a Service Oriented Economy will need a necessary paradigm shift from selling products to offering services. This paradigm shift is visible in the current XaaS (all as a Service) models under development. However, the definition of the front-ends in these XaaS models are still in a very early definition stage.
2. Main principles
Service Front Ends have to enable the end-user to shape the available electronic services and the information connected to them. Therefore, to realize the Future Internet, a set of concepts and principles must be supported by the Service Front End infrastructure:
- End-users have to be fully empowered, so they are able to setup their own web access-point to content and application services by means of picking and assembling web resources (e.g. gadgets) available on the Internet (”LEGO” philosophy). This indeed has the effect of making users be the drivers of the value chain defining the way businesses get connected.
- Active participation in the future Internet has to be enabled by allowing the end users to create the applications as well as gadgets they want to provide. Sharing and exchanging knowledge, gadgets and applications with others is seen as an accelerator to the adoption of innovations, and the improvement of productivity. Tools for supporting social networking are envisioned here.
- Interaction must be seamlessly adapted and relevant to context at any time, giving the term “context” the widest possible meaning, in a way that comprises both user context (knowledge, profile, preferences, language, information about social networks the user belongs to, etc.) and service delivery context (static and dynamic characteristics of the device used for access, geographical and time location, connection bandwidth, etc.). Dynamic context variability and user mobility must also be taken into consideration.
- Access to sustainable business marketplace of services must be supported enabling services from different providers to be bundled together with the necessary economic trading in place, supporting different pricing and revenue models.
- Trust and reputation mechanism must be supported to enable sharing and selection of trustworthy gadgets and services. Dynamic service-oriented environments require automated techniques for the computation of trust among humans and services.
3. Service Front End Open Alliance
The Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance is a set of industrial and academic organizations that declare to share a concrete vision on how the Service Front End infrastructure for the Future Internet of Services can be implemented to overcome the aforementioned limitations and challenges. They together commit to spend resources to:
- Produce concrete open specifications of components in the Reference Architecture they envision, taking an active role in processes worldwide that may be instrumental for the adoption of their envisioned Reference Architecture, including relevant standardization processes.
- Integrate results of projects they run and agree to link to the Open Alliance, with the goal of producing a complete and coherent set of software components that work as reference implementation (open source or not) for each part of the envisioned Reference Architecture.
The SFE Open Alliance is open to those who embrace the same architectural vision, which rely on a shared set of principles, and agree on integrating already available (or future) results of their work with those coming from a number of base/founding projects.
Components to be defined within the SFE Open Alliance have a lifecycle beyond those of the private or publicly funded projects supporting research and development activities during a given period of time. Members commit to define, maintain and push a joint Roadmap that drives evolution of components in the Reference Architecture or the addition of new ones. The open source approach followed in development of some of these components ease evolution over time as well as collaboration with new projects.
Current members of the SFE Open Alliances are listed here.Base/founding projects are presented here.
