Semantic Interfaces for Mobile Services

Sixth Framework Programme Project

Project summary:
Project type: Specific Target Research Project (STREP)
Project start: January 2006
Project duration: 30 months
Project budget: 4,3M EUR

Project Summary

This project is about a novel technology, dubbed semantic interfaces, enabling rapid development, dynamic discovery, and composition of mobile services. Compared to the well known static interfaces currently in use, semantic interfaces also define the dynamic behaviour and the goals of the collaboration across an interface. This enables safety and liveness properties to be checked effectively and to support service discovery and service composition at runtime with compatibility guarantees.

Objectives

SIMS will provide tools for design and validation of service components with semantic interfaces. SIMS will provide middleware that enables discovery and validation of service opportunities between peers in ad-hoc interactions. The middleware will support efficient deployment of service components through runtime composition of applications from service components.

Relevance

Enabling technologies for rapid service design and deployment is a special priority of the 2.4.5 Strategic Objective, specifically focusing on interoperability. Advances in design tools and methods developed by this project address the design problem, while new middleware mechanisms address deployment. Interoperability is addressed by mechanisms for runtime discovery of service opportunities between ad-hoc peers, across terminal, network and operator boundaries.

Impact

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.

Achieving the objectives

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 static and dynamic 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.

The Consortium

European partners from academic and applied research unite with design tool and middleware vendors, as well as advanced 3rd Party Service Providers that can influence and evaluate the technology developed in the project.

SIMS Partners

• Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning ved NTH (SINTEF), Norway
• Retevisión Móvil, S.A. AMENA, Spain
• Appear Networks AB, Sweden
• Gentleware AG, Germany
• Gintel AS, Norway
• Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
• Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), Poland

SIMS web page

Do you want to get more information about the project? Visit the official IST SIMS web page