Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

INRIA Associate Team SeaS: University of Oslo

Participants : Frédéric Loiret, Gabriel Hermosillo, Russel Nzekwa, Daniel Romero, Romain Rouvoy, Lionel Seinturier.

Middleware for Sensor as a Service (Seas ) is a collaboration initiative that intends to contribute to the vision of the Future Internet as an open-source middleware platform, based on robust Web standards, breaking existing IT silos and leveraging the development of innovative hybrid service-oriented architectures spanning from Wireless Sensor Networks to Ubiquitous and Cloud Computing. Given that one of the objectives of Europe is to develop the convergence of IT networks (mobile or fixed) and the fact that many of the upcoming mobile devices are integrating services (from phones down to sensors and radio frequency identification), we believe that one of the challenges for the next generation society will consist in enabling a distributed middleware platform for the dynamic provision of hybrid services and the scalable dissemination of data. In particular, we believe that the sensor capabilities can be reflected as a service accessible from the Internet or any IT system using standard Web protocols. The resulting services will be hybrid in the sense that they will reflect the wide diversity of sensor devices available nowadays, but we aim at providing a uniform solution to leverage the development of applications on top of physical or virtual sensors. This platform includes not only the sensor level (description, discovery, communication, reconfiguration...), but also the platform level services (dissemination, storage, query, adaptation...) that are required for enabling such a vision. The resulting platform will bring additional opportunities for the development of innovative service-based systems by exploiting the emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Ubiquitous Computing, and Cloud Computing environments. Along the three years of activity, the SeaS collaboration will target to incrementally achieve the following objectives:

• Task 1 on Integration: Enabling Hybrid Service-Oriented Architectures,

• Task 2 on Adaptation: Supporting Dynamic Evolution of Hybrid Sensor Services,

• Task 3 on Scalability: Building a Scalable Data Dissemination Infrastructure.

Read more at http://seas.ifi.uio.no/ .

ERCIM Working Group Software Evolution

Participant : Laurence Duchien.

The Working Group (WG) on Software Evolution is one of the many working groups supported by ERCIM. The main goal of the WG is to identify a set of formally-founded techniques and associated tools to support software developers with the common problems they encounter when evolving large and complex software systems. With this initiative, the WG plans to become a Virtual European Research and Training Centre on Software Evolution. Read more at http://www.planet-evolution.org .

IAP MoVES

Participants : Laurence Duchien, Patrick Heymans, Daniel Romero.

The Belgium IAP (Interuniversity Attraction Poles) MoVES (Fundamental Issues in Software Engineering: Modeling, Verification and Evolution of Software) is a project whose partners are the Belgium universities (VUB, KUL, UA, UCB, ULB, FUNDP, ULg, UMH) and three European institutes (INRIA, IC and TUD) respectively from France, Great Britain and Netherlands. The project has started in January 2007 and is scheduled for a 60-month period.

This consortium combines the leading Belgian research teams and their neighbors in software engineering, with recognized scientific excellence in MDE, software evolution, formal modeling and verification, and AOSD. The long term objective of our network is to strengthen existing collaborations and forge new links between those teams, and to leverage and disseminate our research expertise in this domain at an European level. The project focuses on the development, integration and extension of state-of-the-art languages, formalisms and techniques for modeling and verifying dependable software systems and supporting the evolution of Software-intensive systems.

This year, we welcome Patrick Heymans from FUNDP as invited scientist.

Read more at http://moves.vub.ac.be .

ICT FP7 SOA4All Integrated Project

Participants : Damien Fournier, Philippe Merle.

Service-Oriented Architectures for All (SOA4All) is a large-scale Integrating Project funded by the European Seventh Framework Program, under the Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering research area. This is a 36-month project started in March 2008. Partners are: Atos Origin (Spain), British Telecommunications (UK), CEFRIEL (Italy), EBM WebSourcing (France), Hanival Internet Services GmbH (Austria), INRIA (France), Intelligent Software Components (Spain), Ontotext Lab (Bulgaria), Open University (UK), SAP AG (Germany), Seekda OG (Austria), TIE (Netherlands), The University of Manchester (UK), TXT e-Solutions Spa (Italy), Universitaet Karlsruhe (Germany), University Innsbruck (Austria).

SOA4All will help to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology: the main objective of the project is to provide a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates complementary and evolutionary technical advances—i.e., SOA, context management, Web principles, Web 2.0 and Semantic Web—into a coherent and domain-independent service delivery platform  [52] .

Further information is available on the website of the project: http://www.soa4all.eu .