News Story

The Ever-growing Future Internet Contributes to a 2500 Event in Valencia

John Domingue, Sunday 18 Apr 2010

This week saw over 2500 participants attend a large EU meeting: "From Economic Recovery to Sustainability". This large meeting combined large public-private partnerships in the areas of: Factories of the Future, Energy Efficient Buildings, Green Cars and the Future Internet. Each of these areas is associated with a significant pool of funding and at the event a 300M Euro public-private initiative related to the Future Internet was announced. The main meeting was kicked-off with speeches from a number of prominent members of the European Commission and the Spanish Government including the Vice President of the European Commission, the Commissioner for the European Digital Agenda, the Spanish State Secretary of Telecomunications and Information Society and the Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation. The meeting also had heavy involvement from the major European network, mobile and software industries. This included keynote talks from: the CTO of the Thales Group, Vice President of SAP, the Executive Director of Telef�nica and the CEO of ATOS Origin. KMi was involved in the week in a number of ways. John Domingue and Carlos Pedrinaci gave invited talks at the NESSI Projects Summit at the start of the week on "The Service Layer" and "SOA, Semantics & Web 2.0: Towards a Web of Billions of Services". NESSI is a European Technology Platform which brings together the main industrial players in Europe related to Software and Services. The Executive Board of NESSI includes: Alcatel Lucent, ATOS Origin, BT, IBM, HP, Nokia, SAP, Siemens, Software AG, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Thales. In his role as a co-ordinator for the Future Internet Assembly John Domingue also co-Chaired a session on Search and Discovery in the Future Internet which also included presentations from Siemens, Exalead and SAP. He was also invited onto the final panel in the closing plenary. In addition to the excitement attached to the launch of the 300M initiative associated with the Future Internet there has, as one can imagine, been a lot of discussion on the technical, social and business principles that a new global infrastructure should follow. From a technical point of view it is evident that interoperability is a key issue at the network and service levels and also for a number of key vertical sectors. For example, Smart Grids, enabling the more efficient generation and use of electrical power by companies and end-users has interoperability as a major technological hurdle to be crossed. A second technical highlight was that SAP, the world’s third largest software provider, will now base its development of the "Internet of Services" on USDL a rich service description model influenced by previous research in KMi on a Web Services Modelling Ontology. We will continue to work with SAP on this through our SOA4All project which was highlighted by the SAP Vice President in his Keynote talk. The only downside of the meeting was related to the volcanic eruptions in Iceland and the related travel problems. A significant number of conference attendees were stranded by the flight cancellations and at the time of writing this remains an issue for the author of this article.