Imagine that compatible service components for different terminals and networks can easily be made by small innovative companies, based on open source service specifications shared by all service providers.
This is what SIMS seeks to make possible
ABOUT SIMS
| Summary |  |
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SIMS will provide tools for design and validation of service components. SIMS will providemiddleware that enables discovery and validation of service opportunities between peers in ad-hoc interactions, and efficient deployment of service components through runtime composition of applications from service components.
By making it possible to discover service component interoperability at runtime, SIMS will enable a new model for rapid deployment and delivery of reliable services.
The research is based on recent basic research within modelling and validation of teleservices exploiting semantic interfaces and service ontologies. The core idea of SIMS is that semantic interfaces provide new means to specify and design service components and to guarantee compatibility in component compositions. They enable scalable service discovery, selection and composition mechanisms at runtime. Semantic interfaces are instrumental to a rapid and goal driven development process.
| Technical Approach | |
The core idea of SIMS is that semantic interfaces provide means to discover, compare, and enhance collaborative capabilities at runtime, so that joint service opportunities can be detected and service goals achieved. The enhancement can entail component composition at runtime, so that peer devices can achieve desired service goals when they collaborate.
Many approaches provide partial solutions, such as JINI, Web Services and recently the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm. These are based on static interface descriptions of service components. However, the interfaces of collaborating service components must also define interaction behaviour, i.e. the specific order in which feature initiatives can be taken or accepted. This is necessary so that the basic safety and liveness properties of the collaborating components can be validated. This is identified as an open and important research problem, since convergent mobile services will combine aspects of both teleservices and information services. The concept of semantic interface seems to be a promising solution to this problem.
| Key Issues | |
Application composition at runtime accompanied by validation of semantic interfaces means that new service opportunities can arise, while ensuring interoperability between the composed service components. New service opportunities can arise between peers that interact in an ad-hoc fashion; this kind of “automated learning” can support efficient propagation of services.
Existing techniques for service discovery will be extended with runtime discovery of compatible semantic interfaces, and be used to evaluate service opportunities between ad-hoc peers.
Only valid service opportunities will be presented to the end user as available service features. In addition to service opportunities available due to installed service components, service discovery can determine service opportunities by comparing the goals of peers, and support compositions of components to achieve new service goals, with or without end user involvement. Only compatible service components will be used in compositions; validation of this is performed at both design time and at runtime. Seen from the end-user, SIMS provides updated services that interact reliably.
The design tool components developed in SIMS will complement existing tools based on the standard Unified Modeling Language (UML), thus enhancing and extending best practice methods and tools for the design of mobile services.
SIMS middleware will extend a state-of-the-art mobile middleware platform, and define a reference architecture that is platform independent. The middleware will support a variety of devices like smart-phones and PDAs.
| Expected Impact | |
Service designers will have access to methods, languages and tools supporting a seamless design flow from specification to implementation of service components. This enables them to:
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Service providers will have access to middleware supporting runtime composition of end user applications from the “latest and greatest” service components. This will enable them to efficiently roll out new services.
End users will have access to new, advanced services on their mobile devices as soon as they are made available. They will experience that they acquire and are presented new service features seamlessly and automatically, with no loss of quality of existing services.
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