The Flemish Department of Economy, Science and Innovation (EWI) has started the Flanders Research Information Space programme (FRIS) in 2007 with the goal of transparent and automated flowing of research information via the construction of an information architecture. Doing so, the FRIS programme wants to accelerate the innovation value chain by (i) efficient and fast access to research information for all relevant stakeholders; (ii) offer improved customer services (e-government); and (iii) increase efficiency and effectiveness of the R&D policy. For FRIS to become sustainable, EWI has set the following critical requirements.
for each of these “commoditized” processes, every stakeholder has different expectations of the underlying services. Two processes may involve many repeatable activities. However, the effective implementation of a process to produce one particular service usually involves many variations of control flows and stakeholders. Moreover, different regional backgrounds of the respective stakeholders add up to the complexity. Hence, the mere static meaning (read: data semantics) of research data is not sufficient anymore. In order to provide a more complete (i.e. less ambiguous) interpretation of the data, data semantics has to be complemented by the “dynamic” semantics of the particular service context in which data was created or manipulated.
A combination of service development and a managed change process will achieve the strategic goals6. Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI)7 is a new research and development initiative funded by the EC that roots its business semantics-driven framework on two fundamental constructs, namely, interoperation hub and business artifact.
An interoperation hub serves as a virtual rendezvous for multiple services that are to work together towards a common goal. Domain-specific interoperation hubs such as the EasyChair conference submission management system or Salesforce.com have already shown the value of interoperation hubs; the research here will make it possible to easily create, launch, participate in, and maintain ACSI interoperation hubs in essentially any application domain. Similar to EasyChair, an ACSI interoperation hub will serve as the anchor for a collaboration environment, that is, an IT environment used to support large numbers of service collaborations that operate independently, but which focus on essentially equivalent common goals. Unlike orchestrators, an interoperation hub works well in the context of open service networks. These hubs are primarily reactive, serving as a kind of structured white board that participating services can refer to, that can be updated with information relevant to the group, that can assist the services by carrying out selected tasks, and that can notify services of key events.
The interoperation hubs used here will be structured around dynamic artifacts. These provide an holistic marriage of data and process, both treated as first-class citizens, as the basic building block for modeling, specifying, and implementing services and business processes. In the context of single enterprises, it has shown that the use of artifacts can lead to substantial cost savings in the design and deployment of business operations and processes, and can dramatically improve communication between stakeholders, especially in cases where they represent different “silos” of the enterprise or community. Artifacts can give an end-to-end view of how key conceptual business entities evolve as they move through the business operations, in many cases across two or more silos. As a result, artifacts can substantially simplify the management of “hand-off of data and processing between services and organizations. A key pillar of the ACSI research is to generalize the advantages of artifacts to the context of interoperation hubs and service collaborations. 6 A first realisation is the FRIS research portal (http://www.researchportal.be) to exhibit current research information on projects, researchers and organisations of the Flemish universities. 7 http://acsi-project.eu/