ICT SHOK: Flexible Services

UbiService project proposal (2008)
(Agent-Driven Semantically Enriched Ubiquitous Services Architecture)

Being the major means of broad-scale value provisioning to customers, services have always been various and plentiful. Different individuals and organizations are used to expose their skills, competencies and practices as services to competitively and easily promote them to the mass market. The importance of services can thus hardly be overestimated. Electronic services, as virtual counterpart of physical world services, have quickly gained similar importance and role in the evolving virtual networked information society. Although early electronic services were rather rigid, irreusable and user-oriented only, nowadays they are much more versatile both in terms of their structure and in usage. Nevertheless, challenges for services’ flexibility, manageability, usability, customization and added value are currently ever so crucial.

Aside from apparent but complicated challenge of value-added autonomous functionality design, there is a fundamental challenge for seamless service interoperability (and accompanying challenges for services’ ubiquity and reusability) which must be solved in the first place. This interoperability quest is also identified as crucial in many adjacent science and technology areas such as future Internet and pervasive computing environments, which often consider services as the integral part of their networked infrastructures. However, only in services infrastucture research service interoperability problem is being viewed in its purity and comprehensiveness. Specifically, we see at least the following two interoperability problems: interoperability between the services created by different providers and/or on top of different technological standards, and the need for seamless and flexible collaboration (including discovery, coordination, conflict resolution and possibly even negotiation) amongst the services on the possibly most global scale. To tackle these problems, UbiService intends utilization of semantic languages (based on semantic technologies such as RDF) for declarative specification of and services’ characteristics and behaviour, application of software agents as engines executing those specifications, and establishment of common ontologies to facilitate and govern seamless interoperation of services on a global scale.

The major project objective is to create the formal and technological basis for development of a universal ubiquitous service architecture that would allow creation and robust provisioning of flexible, personalized, dynamically configurable, context-aware electronic services. To achieve that, a specialized agent-driven middleware platform UbiService will be designed. It is envisioned that each service exposed as an individually accessible entity through the computing environment will be assigned a representative agent within UbiService. The resulting multi-agent system will be exploited as a mediation facility enabling rich cooperation capabilities (e.g., discovery, coordination, adaptability, and negotiation) amongst the services inhabiting the distributed computing environment. Utilization of semantic technologies in UbiService will ensure efficient and autonomous coordination among UbiService agents and will thus ensure interoperability and flexible collaboration between associated services.

Also, UbiService Ontology as the reference vocabulary for building UbiService service specifications will be designed. It will be an important asset contributing to interoperability realization within future ubiquitous Flexible Service Ecosystem and in stringent conformance with the major principles laid out in ICT-SHOK Flexible Services Strategic Research Agenda (FS-SRA). UbiService ontology will be used not only for the benefit of UbiService middleware architecture, but also and most importantly for facilitation of interoperability and integration of existing and brand-new future services and methodologies which will be later developed within FS-SRA field. The core ontology-driven UbiService platform as well as a few demonstration cases of its utilization in various application scenarios will be developed during the project period. Through appropriate declarative specification of services’ behaviour and using sophisticated choreographic control of agents in an generic networked environment, the UbiService will enable various services to automatically discover each other and to configure complex services functionally composed of the individual services’ functionalities.