Consultation on Future Research Priorities on Software & Services

Welcome to the On-line Consultation process of the European Commission, DG Information Society and Media, Service and Software Architectures and Infrastructures Unit (INFSO D3). This is a consultation on the 7th Framework programme of Research and Development in Information and Communication Technologies.

Through this consultation process you are able to provide your input to the definition of the Work Programme for 2011-2013 in the field of software and services. This Work Programme will be the basis for the next calls of proposal in this area.

The forum-based consultation tool allows you to provide your comments, contributions and suggestions in a simple format. Inserted contributions can be publicly displayed on-line in one of two ways – either as an anonymous contribution or including your name and organisation. Or you can choose to include your contribution in the data provided to the EC but not be publicly visible on-line.

The consultation is now closed.For further information please contact sandro.delia (at) ec.europa.eu.

The European Commission services are pleased to acknowledge the facilities offered by ECSS for its consultation. ECSS will not filter or process the data that is submitted to this consultation, but will deliver it unchanged to the Commission.

• 2009-11-02 19:41:38
  Enterprise Architectures and Value Networks In the future business activities are increasingly done by networks of actors having business, service and infrastructure relationships. Business processes cross often company borders and software as a service and cloud computing paradigms get more widely used. This development calls for new way of architecture management and governance. Research is needed to develop future oriented architectures and process management etc for complex web of business activities realised by ecosystems of service providers.
• 2009-11-02 15:44:57
  There is a chasm between the potential and the benefits of open source software and its current adoption. In recent years much research has gone into open source software itself: in its development model, the software, the structure of open source communities and the business model. This research has demonstrated time and again that many open source software programs are qualitatively good and the development model is resilient. Also, there are numerous sound economic and political reasons for governments to stimulate the adoption of open source. Nevertheless, the adoption of open source software is slow. We would like to see research done to close the chasm. We believe such research should focus on the reasons organisations have to not adopt open source software. The research will have to take many disciplines into account: technical, economical, organizational, judicial, etc. The innovation part of this research should, however, not be the analysis of current affairs. It should move beyond and develop innovative solutions to remove these barriers. Solutions can be technical, but need not be. It is more likely that other barriers are stronger and more difficult overcome. Ideally, research efforts on this topic should combine technical expertise with judicial, economical, behavioural and other relevant disciplines. What is the relevance for the EU? - Policy: this initiative matches goals / is meant to achieve goals. - Economy: EU position in ICT can be made stronger (against upcoming ICT regions like India and UAE). - Enhancement of innovation position in the world - Economic stimulation through knowledge
• 2009-11-02 14:00:53
  If we go back to the influential 1999 USA PITAC (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee) report, we notice that one of the key findings was that investment in IT R&D is too focused on near-term problems. I think that European Research on Software and Services suffers today from exactly the same problem. There is an abundance of software infrastructures, which are monolithic, fragile, and require lots of effort to interoperate with different technologies. Their maintenance has a high cost and, way too often, lots of money is invested to add patches. I think software as a whole needs radically new ideas and a significant investement in fundamental, long-term research to guarantee future European leadership. The arguments made 10 years ago by the PITAC committee apply equally well to Europe today: "make fundamental software research an absolute priority"!
• 2009-11-01 16:04:07
  Most researchers nowadays agree that current and future software systems and services should be considered as loosely coupled interacting heterogeneous agents, which must collaborate on a trustful environment. Like in society, the interaction of such agents in SOA needs to be governed by normative contracts. Such contracts are to be understood in a broad sense, including what is the expected normal behavior, and also what is to be done in exceptional cases and what are the penalties in case of misbehavior. Such contracts must be concerned with functional, as well as non-functional/quantitative properties, including for instance real-time aspects (performance, availability, etc). These contracts must act at different levels: from how we program services, e.g. at the object and component level, to the business and decision making level. They must also regulate negotiation when a service is requested, composition of services, and of course monitoring during the real interaction between service provider and consumer. As systems evolve during time, it is naturally to think that services also evolve, and with them the corresponding service contracts. For example, a service offering to download music to a mobile phone may evolve through the form of new promotions. These promotions may then overwrite previous rights by extending them, or simply giving the option to the user to choose between a previous offer and a (hopely) more attractive new one. If the user agrees with accepting the promotion, then the old contract is then modified by adding and/or deleting clauses. At the end of the day the user wants to be sure that she got what she paid for, and this should be guaranteed by the corresponding current contract. The challenge is then to be able to handle evolution of services together with evolution of contracts. This calls for a a contract-based understanding and development philosophy of communicating information systems. Moreover, there is a need to address foundational and practical questions concerning the notion of contracts without being decoupled from the notion of services. Also, a contract-aware programming scheme would be desirable, in order to program services already having in mind the dynamic aspect. We also need to provide development tools, and to develop specification and verification techniques that support efficient production of evolvable systems and contracts.
• 2009-11-01 15:22:31
  At present and in the future the real issue in the information and IT sector will be information, not IT. Reasons are simple: ... Organisations only invest in (administrative) IT because they need information. ... Information is not an IT issue. Even further: IT professionals treat information from a technology perspective. For that reason it is a big problem for them, while if it is treated as a business issue it usually becomes quite understandable, a very powerful instrument to have as a corporate resource. Although further development of IT is very necessary and relevant, the main issue is to determine what data is information in organisations. There is only marginal research and development on information, and this will limit the strength of our organisations in the near future, and therefore will affect our market effectiveness more and more.