What is SemEUsE?
The growth of large service ecosystems involve radical changes in both enterprise Business Process organisation and IT infrastructure to fit inter-operability and agility requirements. To fulfil these requirements, one may address either the information system's alignment within the enterprise organisation or the service infrastructure itself in order to provide an open context-aware service bus, enabling both syntactic and semantic interoperability.
Currently, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies are being successfully used to solve the syntactic interoperability problem whereas the composition (e.g., orchestration) engines provide increased agility. Nevertheless, such classical SOA technologies and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) concept technologies as those developed in the JOnES platform or in the IST INFRAWEBS project do not efficiently support large collaborative business networks, as the service description is still limited (and does not provide semantic interoperability) and as the global context (i.e. security, reliability, QoS requirements, etc.) is not taken into account while composing services. Semantic service descriptions (as provided in the SCORWARE project, the ITEA/S4ALL project or in the IST STASIS project) are introduced in order to overcome the semantic interoperability boundaries but such systems are limited to functional description, as they do not integrate non-functional requirements (as dependability, QoS, etc.).
In general, developing large service ecosystems involves taking into account nomadic properties and quality of service (or non-functional) requirements (including dependability and related reliability and security constraints), considering in particular that these extended environments may use a large variety of communication infrastructures. Such non-functional requirements can be taken into account in a context-aware service composition process, as proposed in the FAROS project whereas execution context can be captured by CompositeProbes as in the Selfware project.
Nevertheless, none of the systems investigated in the aforementioned projects take into account the full set of challenges encountered by large service ecosystems. This lack of “integration” dimension is the main challenge addressed by the SemEUsE project, which will extend classical ESB and SOA technologies to take into account semantic services and non functional requirements while composing services and running resulting complex, composite services. As such, SemEUsE will contribute to the inter-operability and agility challenges faced by large service ecosystems, effectively providing an adapted service infrastructure able to increase the information system agility.
The SemEUsE project specifically aims to provide a context-aware semantic service architecture addressing both the design phase, thanks to theoretical context-aware semantic service models and policy-oriented design patterns, and the runtime phase, thanks to a Dynamic Semantic Service Bus. This extended service bus is based on a static and dynamic service composition engine so that the current execution context and particular requirements (related for example to nomadic constraints) can be continuously taken into account. A dynamic monitoring system, using CompositeProbes, will also be connected to the orchestration process so that QoS aware late binding can be implemented.
The main objectives of SemEUsE are then to:
· Enable service to be used anywhere from any kind of device (pervasive technologies).
· Address non-functional/QoS requirements associated with service provisioning, with a special emphasis on dependability constraints and more specifically reliability and security.
· Provide an agile framework supporting business-level Service level Agreements (SLA) definition and monitor system behaviour accordingly in order to enforce required non-functional properties of, potentially composite, service execution.
Main contact point: Hugues VINCENT ( hugues.vincent@thalesgroup.com ).