Arne J. Berre

Future Internet - FIS 2008

This book constitutes the thorouhly refereed post-conference proceedings of the First Future Internet Symposium, FIS 2008, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2008. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address novel ideas and current research results related to the future internet infrastructure, user-generated content, content visualization, usability, trust and security, collaborative workflows, the internet of services and service science.

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term “envirofied” Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management).

Future Internet technologies for environmental applications

This paper investigates the usability of Future Internet technologies (aka “Generic Enablers of the Future Internet”) in the context of environmental applications. The paper incorporates the best aspects of the state-of-the-art in environmental informatics with geospatial solutions and scalable processing capabilities of Internet-based tools. It specifically targets the promotion of the “Environmental Observation Web” as an observation-centric paradigm for building the next generation of environmental applications. In the Environmental Observation Web, the great majority of data are considered as observations. These can be generated from sensors (hardware), numerical simulations (models), as well as by humans (human sensors). Independently from the observation provenance and application scope, data can be represented and processed in a standardised way in order to understand environmental processes and their interdependencies. The development of cross-domain applications is then leveraged by technologies such as Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Big Data Processing and Analytics. For example, “the cloud” can satisfy the peak-performance needs of applications which may occasionally use large amounts of processing power at a fraction of the price of a dedicated server farm. The paper also addresses the need for Specific Enablers that connect mainstream Future Internet capabilities with sensor and geospatial technologies. Main categories of such Specific Enablers are described with an overall architectural approach for developing environmental applications and exemplar use cases.

DataGraft: One-stop-shop for open data management

This paper introduces DataGraft (https://datagraft.net/) – a cloud-based platform for data transformation and publishing. DataGraft was developed to provide better and easier to use tools for data workers and developers (e.g. open data publishers, linked data developers, data scientists) who consider existing approaches to data transformation, hosting, and access too costly and technically complex. DataGraft offers an integrated, flexible, and reliable cloud-based solution for hosted open data management. Key features include flexible management of data transformations (e.g. interactive creation, execution, sharing, reuse) and reliable data hosting services. This paper provides an overview of DataGraft focusing on the rationale, key features and components, and evaluation.

The Future Internet Enablement of the Environment Information Space

This paper motivates the enablement of the Future Internet to become a highly functional service platform supporting the design and the operation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. It reports on the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership programme. It describes the software components (environmental and specific enablers) which are required to connect with the domain-independent capabilities (generic enablers) of the Future Internet core platform for geospatially and environmentally-driven applications.

DataGraft: Simplifying Open Data Publishing

In this demonstrator we introduce DataGraft – a platform for Open Data management. DataGraft provides data transformation, publishing and hosting capabilities that aim to simplify the data publishing lifecycle for data workers (i.e., Open Data publishers, Linked Data developers, data scientists). This demonstrator highlights the key features of DataGraft by exemplifying a data transformation and publishing use case with property-related data.

Service Innovation and Service Realisation with VDML and ServiceML

It is shown how a service-oriented and model-based approach for Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Engineering can provide agile support for the different abstraction and modeling levels from business model and service innovation to cloud-based service realisation. Business model innovation is supported with a basis in a business model framework with six views, where each view is supported by a corresponding diagram from the Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML). Service innovation is supported by the Service Modeling Language (ServiceML), which shares the core collaboration models of VDML for role modeling and value networks, according to the five views of the AT-ONE service innovation method. Service realisation is supported by further transformation to SoaML and a model-based service execution platform. This approach presents a framework using the emerging OMG standard language VDML together with ServiceML for service design and engineering, relating value models, process models, user interface and interaction flow models, and service architectures and service contract models.

Tabular Data Cleaning and Linked Data Generation with Grafterizer

Over the past several years the amount of published open data has increased significantly. The majority of this is tabular data, that requires powerful and flexible approaches for data cleaning and preparation in order to convert it into Linked Data. This paper introduces Grafterizer – a software framework developed to support data workers and data developers in the process of converting raw tabular data into linked data. Its main components include Grafter, a powerful software library and DSL for data cleaning and RDF-ization, and Grafterizer, a user interface for interactive specification of data transformations along with a back-end for management and execution of data transformations. The proposed demonstration will focus on Grafterizer’s powerful features for data cleaning and RDF-ization in a scenario using data about the risk of failure of transport infrastructure components due to natural hazards.

Organizational Interoperability Supported through Goal Alignment with BMM and Service Collaboration with SoaML

Organisational interoperability requires a matching of goals and provided and required services between interacting organizations. It is being shown that the recent OMG standards BMM and SoaML can be used by business people to reach this agreement, as well as serve as a foundation for describing the realization of interoperability through cross organisational business processes and further realization of IT support with semantic and technical service interoperability. We illustrate the approach with an example of service identification from the Norwegian national Health ICT architecture.

Model Driven Interoperability through Semantic Annotations using SoaML and ODM

Abstract Enterprise Interoperability is increasingly being enabled by use of service oriented architectures for the IT systems involved. A combined use of enterprise models, ontologies and service models can facilitate better semantic interoperability of the services being provided and requested. The focus of this paper is to show that service interoperability can be supported through a model driven approach with service oriented systems being described with service models (in SoaML) with semantic annotations to and from ontology models (in ODM)