Integrating Knowledge and Resources (IA-1)

by Maike Uhlig — last modified Nov 08, 2009 17:28

Motivation

While many research institutes and R&D groups in Europe have developed research agendas there has been no coordinated effort to holistically address services research and technology requirements and associated barriers that cut across multiple scientific disciplines.

Currently, research activities in these research groups are typically very fragmented and disjunctive, concentrating on very specific problems using their own research mechanisms and approaches, which are typically not exploited to the full-extend by other research groups. As a result, there is much redundant effort in four major research communities, viz. service oriented architectures (SOAs), business process management, software engineering, and grid computing. This redundancy and fragmentation also propagates to supplementary research fields, including, human-computer interaction (HCI), artificial intelligence (AI) and formal methods.

Fusing research agendas and reallocating research priorities will result in tantalizing synergic effects, surmounting the problem of fragmentation and redundancy. In this way, converging research efforts across these communities will leverage innovative service research, shaping an exiting new research community on Software Services and Systems that strives for advancement of new service technologies through concerted research activities on a shared research backbone, cutting across various traditionally isolated, existing research communities.

Objectives

The overall objective of this integration activity is to tackle fragmentation and isolation of research by:

Convergence Knowledge Model (WP-IA-1.1): Developing a convergence knowledge model that captures terminology, classifies competences of beneficiaries and their research. The convergence knowledge model will support elimination of duplication of research efforts, better attuning of the research activities of beneficiary institutions and restructuring of already existing research agendas toward a common research objective, integration of knowledge, and, production and harmonisation of research results.