project acronym:

INFRAWEBS

project title:

Intelligent Framework for Generating Open (Adaptable) Development Platforms for Web-Service Enabled Applications Using Semantic Web Technologies, Distributed Decision Support Units and Multi-Agent-Systems

project duration: 30 months

project start: 1st August 2004

Web services are used in a wide range of applications, but their usefulness is limited by a lack of effective means for different types of web services to work together.
Existing software tools and systems are mostly incoherent and "static", usually due to proprietary aspects or features that prevent information from being exchanged effectively. As a result, existing development and networking platforms are missing important features such as reconfigurability, adaptability and self-organisation. This step from static to dynamic web services requires the use of semantic technologies, so as to structure information sources and domains in a way that can be processed by machines. This, in turn, requires a bridging between web service and Semantic Web (SW) technologies in order to implement semantically-rich service descriptions.

The main INFRAWEBS project focus and objective is the development of an application-oriented software toolset for creating, maintaining and executing WSMO-based Semantic Web Services (SWS) within their whole life cycle.

This next generation of tools and systems will enable software and service providers to build open and extensible development platforms for web service applications. These services will run on open standards and specifications, such as BPEL4WS, WSMO, WSMX, WSML, SPARQL, RDF, etc. In particular, they will be compliant with WSMO (Web Services Modelling Ontology), a W3C initiative in Semantic Web services.

The systems generated will consist of loosely-coupled and linked INFRAWEB units, with each unit providing tools and adaptable system components. Developers will be able to use these components to analyse, design and maintain WSMO-based Semantic Web services across the whole lifecycle.

These Semantic Web services offer a new dimension in collaborative work and service production, service provision and service maintenance in run-time environments.

In the first step, the INFRAWEB units are being used to establish an open development platform for SMEs and industrial vendors.

The essential results will be software modules within an integrated framework. Several functionalities will be provided for the usage in design-time as well as in run-time (by service providers, service designers or service brokers). For the design-time phase they are:

• a SWS Designer
  
  
• an Organizational Memory (CBR based Recommender)
  
  
• the "SIR" (Semantic Information Router)
  
  
• the SWS Composer
  
  

The run-time modules (for service consumers, service providers, service brokers) are given by:

• the Distributed Repository
  
  
• the Service Access Middleware
  
  
• the SWS Executor
  
  
• the QoS (Quality of Service) Broker
  
  
• the Security and Privacy Enabler
  
  

- Administrative Coordination (Contact Person to EC)

Prof Dr Ing F Pautzke, [ University of Applied Sciences ], Bochum, Germany

- Scientific Coordination

Dr Ing H Joachim Nern, [ Aspasia Knowledge Systems ], Duesseldorf, Germany

1 - FHBO - Project Management (Project Coordinator)
Prof Dr Ing F Pautzke
[ Electrical Engineering and Information Sciences ] ; University of Applied Sciences, Bochum, Germany

2 - UIBK - Next Web Generation, QoS-Brokering
Univ Prof Dr rer nat D Fensel, James Scicluna, Dr Axel Polleres
[ Digital Enterprise Research Institute ] ; University of Innsbruck, UIBK, Innsbruck, Austria

3 - IIT - CBR in SW Service Design & Composition
Prof Dr Tanja Atanasova, Prof Dr G Agre
[ IIT - Institute of Information Technology ] ; Bulg. Academy of Science - BAS, Sofia, Bulgaria

4 - SZTAKI - Agent Based Mediation
Dr L Kovacs, Dr A Micsik
[ SZTAKI - Department of Distributed Systems ] ; Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest, Hungary

5 - ICCS - Security & Privacy
Dr Elpida Tzafestas
[ Institute of Communication and Computer Sciences ] ; National Technical University of Athens - NTUA, Athens, Greece

6 - Profium - Semantic Information Routing
Dr Janne Saarela
[ Profium SA ] ; Espoo, Finland

7 - SAI - Distributed Registries
Atanas Kiryakov
[ OntoText Laboratory ] ; Sirma SAI, Sofia, Bulgaria

8 - FUTUREtec Dissemination and Exploitaion, IPRs Issues, Validation.
Responsible: Dr C Rehm-Berbenni and Ing. Andrei Druta
[ FUTUREtec-GmbH ] ; Gesellschaft für angewandte Informatik mbH, Bergisch-Gladbach, Germany

9 - ATOS - Requirement-Profiles & Test-Scenarios
Ozelin Lopez
[ STREAM ] ; Technology Center - Atos Origin, Madrid, Spain

10 - Best-HP - Test-Scenarios & Requirement-Profiles
Marco Di Girolamo, Ettore Riceputi
[ BEST-EIC ] ; Hewlett Packard, Italia

11 - big&Aspa - Organisational Memory - Scientific Coordination
Dr H Joachim Nern, Georg Jesdinski, Michael Kronenberg
[ big7.net GmbH & Aspasia Knowledge Systems ] ; Duesseldorf, Germany

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