Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet

The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solution

Team to Market (T2M): Creating High Performance Teams in the Digital Age

1. Teams are the essential means of product or service delivery and the fundamental building blocks of modern organisations. An effective team can produce results far outperforming a collection of even the most talented individuals when team members coalesce and jell into a single, well-functioning, fully-aligned organism. This report advances the notion of “Team to Market” (T2M) to help business leaders and knowledge workers understand, create and lead high performance teams in the digital age

End User Empowerment through Platforms for Situational Applications

In recent years, new technologies help to enable the vision of agile business platforms leveraging the abilities and innovativeness of knowledge workers. In this article, we refer to the current trend of utilizing platforms for situational applications to increase the level of business agility in terms of improved environmental sensing and responding capabilities. Drawing from the extant literature and informed by the insights of a case study, conducted at a financial services provider, we elaborate on Enterprise Mashups as a new technology that empower end users to create and adapt situational applications. Thereby, we contribute to current requests for further research in the field of digital option generation and realization of business agility capabilities through IT innovations. Moreover, we expand the nomological network by the construct of user empowerment as an important mediator between IT capabilities and business agility

Enhancing User-Service Interaction Through a Global User-Centric Approach to SOA

Considered as enablers of seamless application-to- application integration both within company boundaries and on a global scale, Web Services-based SOAs have traditionally focused on automating service-to-service collaboration. However, they have never featured a "face " to human users. This gap between human users and services still prevents enterprises from realizing how innovations at the SOA front-end help to make people more productive. And, ultimately, it hinders the emergence of a real Web of Services driven by a global, user-centric SOA. In this paper, we revisit the notion of SOA and analyze its major shortcomings with regard to the emergence of a Web of Services enhancing user-service interaction and increased service usability. We then elaborate on novel, currently emerging technologies that facilitate the establishment of the global mesh of interoperable user-centric services. A novel platform architecture is presented that builds on all the key technical enablers

EzWeb/FAST: Reporting on a Successful Mashup-based Solution for Developing and Deploying Composite Applications in the Upcoming Web of Services

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) based on Web Services have attracted a great interest and IT investments during the last years, principally in the context of business-to-business integration within corporate intranets. However, they are nowadays evolving to break through enterprise boundaries, in a revolutionary attempt to make the approach pervasive, leading to what we call a user-centric SOA, i.e. a SOA conceived as a Web of Services made up of compositional resources that empowers end-users to ubiquitously exploit these resources by collaboratively remixing them. In this paper we explore the architectural basis, technologies, frameworks and tools considered necessary to face this novel vision of SOA. We also present the rationale behind EzWeb/FAST: an undergoing EU funded project whose first outcomes could serve as a preliminary proof of concep

Enterprise Mashups: A New Approach for Business Solutions

A mashup is a Web application that integrates content from different providers in order to create a new service which is not offered by the content provider. The development of this kind of applications involves activities such as accessing heterogeneous sources, combining data from different data sources and building graphical interfaces. This factor limits non-experienced computer users to develop these applications. However, nowadays there are enterpriseoriented tools that allow non-experienced user for building mashups in order to respond business needs in an easy and rapid way. Due to this, the enterprise mashup approach has been widely adopted by a large number of enterprises. This paper presents an overview of the enterprise mashup approach, as well as a review of four enterprise-oriented tools which provide a set of features that allows non-expertise users developing mashups into an enterprise. Finally, we present the challenges to be addressed by enterprise-oriented mashup tools in order to provide an easier and faster way of developing mashups

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications