ChairLUCIANO BARESI SecretaryPIETER DE LEENHEER |
Deputy chairsBARBARA PERNICI WINFRIED LAMERSDORF |
Motivations
Services have introduced a permanent and structural change in the software history. They provide the basic constructs to support the rapid and easy development of distributed and heterogeneous applications. Service-oriented systems promise a world where heterogeneous application components are assembled with little effort into a loosely-coupled network that can create flexible and dynamic software systems.
Service-oriented computing introduces the "service-oriented" paradigm into software and application development. Recently, it has been mainly fostered by Web services, which are a particular technology that embodies all the key constituents of the paradigm, but nowadays the same concepts serve a wider landscape. Services are often adopted as high-level abstractions, and the seamless integration of services provided by software components and by humans in the same system is undergoing active research. OSGi, uPnP, and other service-based infrastructures are adopted in many disparate domains. Moreover services do not work solely at application level anymore, but they are also used to characterize ---and abstract from unnecessary details--- the actual offer of fully distributed software platforms (e.g., Microsoft Azure) and computing infrastructures (e.g., Amazon EC2).
All these different opportunities witness the importance of service-oriented systems. Such systems, along with the paradigm they support, are posing, and will pose, significant research challenges for different communities.
Aims and scope
The new working group is proposed as a TC2, TC6, and TC8 initiative. Its goal is to organize and promote the exchange of information on fundamental as well as practical aspects of service-oriented systems. In doing so, the working group will consider service-oriented systems from a technological perspective, but it will also address their business aspects and economic impact. The aim also is to structure a research community that comprises both academia and industry (maybe through living labs) and become an active, permanent, and international forum on services-oriented systems.
Besides the technological underpinnings, the working group will address the different facets of the discipline. It will also try to organize current initiatives and research, and propose suitable and sustainable future research directions.
Organization of work
Given the current level of activities in service orientation, the working group will aim at consolidating initiatives instead of proposing new ones: the working group will become a glue among existing activities, identify the right synergies among existing initiatives, and act as catalyst among existing (sub-) communities. The working group will also aim to consolidate fundamental and theoretical aspects, and to identify future research directions in the discipline. This will pro-vide with proper and shared means to conduct research in the field to whoever is interested in services-oriented computing and systems.
A first foreseen incarnation of these activities will be the provision of qualified support to PhD-level research through the creation of dedicated workshops ad-dressed to supervisors of PhD thesis in the field. Shared and strong foundations will also serve to strengthen the relationships with related fields (e.g., Internet of things and Cloud computing) and to base the coordination of efforts with standardization groups. Additionally, the working group will propose benchmarks and create a shared and distributed sandbox to support experimentation and provide objective instruments for the comparison of the different proposals.
Current situation
As mentioned, the landscape about service-oriented computing is already full with many different initiatives. As for international bodies, we can mention NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative), which is the European Technology Platform dedicated to software and services, and the IEEE Technical Committee on service computing. There are also organizations that address services-oriented systems (e.g., SRII, Open Group, and ERCIM) and standardization bodies, like OASIS, W3C, and OGF.
Many dedicated conferences are run every year: for example, ICSOC, ICWS-SCC-Cloud, and ECOWS are the most significant initiatives worldwide, but we also have ServiceWave, SOCA, Working conference IESS, WWW, APCSC, SSME, SRII conference, Management and Service Science, and New Trends in Information Science and Service Science. As for top journals, IEEE TSC and ACM TWeb are the two most qualified options, but in addition we must mention Springer SOCA, Elsevier JSS, and the International Journal of Information Systems in the services sector. There is also a dedicated series on Service Science published by Springer.