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TripCom - Triple Space Communication
The mission of TripCom was that of taking a significant move towards a new era of the Internet. The Internet was invented in the 1960?s and provides a highly decentralized and scalable architecture for enabling large networks of computers beyond the boundaries of other communication protocols.
The first major evolution step appeared around 20 years later with the wide-spread usage of email. Email changes the communication processes of humans significantly by providing instant communication over any geographical distances in an asynchronous fashion based on the message-exchange paradigm.
The second major evolution step appeared another 10 years later with the wide-spread usage of the World Wide Web. The Web changes communication processes of humans significantly by providing instant publication over any geographical distances in an asynchronous fashion. It is based on broadcasting via persistent publication of information.
The two major asynchronous styles of human communication (directed communication via mail and undirected communication via publication) have been significantly improved through email and Web.
The next step for the Internet is likely to be the direct integration of applications and computers via Web service technology. This network no longer directly interlinks humans but interlinks applications and programs to provide integrated services to the human end-user. However, current Web service technology has only very little to do with the Web. It is based on the message exchange paradigm similar to email communication. Truly Web-enabled Web services will communicate via persistent publication of information.
Realizing this vision and a new technology has been the mission of TripCom with the result of the integrating Tuple Space, Semantic Web (triple), and Web service technologies.
Impact
The idea behind TripCom was to make Web-like communication through publication and search itself machine-processable: The Web revolutionized human communication by providing a platform where people publish and find globally linked information by retaining scalability. A similarly flexible, semantically enhanced infrastructure is meant to facilitate machine to machine communication at large scale.
Main innovation
TripCom improved the ideas of Tuple Space computing by adding semantics by use of a graph-based data-model to rely on Triples. The Triple Space served as a persistent publication system for semantically linked information in semantically clustered subspaces. We developed a scalable and linkable Triple Space storage, based on improving and combining current RDF Stores and Tuple Space infrastructures. We extended the Tuple Space coordination model by tackling complex problems of checking and maintaining consistency in the Triple Space and, thus establishing a novel Semantic Web service paradigm, the Triple Space Communication model. We integrated existing Web service technologies with the newly emerging Triple Space and provided enhanced communication functionality for emerging Semantic Web services frameworks. In order to prove the applicability of our approach, we tackled the lack of standardized business data ontologies by ontologizing the current de facto standard EDI/EDIFACT for business to business process integration and deploying our technology in realistic use case scenarios. The Triple Space was intended to remain an unacceptable means for the automation of real world business process integration without ensuring appropriate security and trust mechanisms. Therefore we tried to provide an infrastructure to ensure that access to triples/Triple Spaces are secure on the one hand and express meta-level semantics on which triples are trusted on the other hand.
Results
The primary objective of Triple Space Communication (TripCom) was the development of a highly scalable, semantically enhanced communication infrastructure which is the result of the integration of Tuple Space, Semantic Web (triple), and Web service technologies:
Figure 1: Conceptual Technology Basis for Triple Space Communication
- Based on Tuple Space Computing we built an innovative architecture (called Triple Space) as a platform for application integration based on persistent publication. We used ideas from the Semantic Web to provide machine processable semantics for this architecture in order to allow mechanized integration of services (data and processes).
- We defined schemas (Ontologies) for predefined standards to enable smooth publication of data and process descriptions. Just as HTML as a common schema for Web documents allowed for smooth publication of data on the Web for humans, pre-defined schemas for machine readable data and processes are a pre-requisite for scalability and usability.
- TripCom was based on Web protocols and Semantic Web technologies. However, as opposed to current technologies subsumed under the term "Web services" which often only hide synchronous, message-based communication behind Web protocols, we proposed a novel Semantic Web service paradigm through:
- the ability to maintain stateful communication thereby empowering Web service choreography and orchestration mechanisms,
- asynchronous communication via persistent publication of semantically linked data so that Web service scalability and reliability can be improved,
- robust security and trust mechanisms which are pluggable,
- decoupled communications that reduce (if not eliminate) the need for a priori knowledge of the partner and communication channel thus enabling multi-party interaction for free,
- easy integration of existing services and legacy infrastructures that use different terminologies by Semantic Web technologies.
More details
- Project Presentation (PDF, 989KB)
- Poster (PDF, 110KB)
- ICT Results article: "Triple Space" offers web for web services (23 September 2009)
- Annual Report 2008 (PDF, 202KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF, 119KB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF, 104KB)
- The TripCom website is the main platform of the project. It provides an overview of the project, its objectives, structure, progress and management.
Administrative Details
- TripCom was a 3 year Specific Targeted Research Project funded by the European Commission 6th Framework Programme.
- TripCom started on 1 April 2006 and ended on 31 March 09.
- The overall budget of the project has been of roughly ? 3.6 Mio.
- 9 partners from 7 European countries have been involved in the project.
List of Participants
- Leopold Franzens Universität (LFUI), Innsbruck, AUT (Project Coordinator)
- National University of Ireland (NUIG), Galway, IRE
- Universität Stuttgart (USTUTT), GER
- Technische Universität Wien (TUW), AUT
- Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), GER
- Ontotext Lab, Sirma Group Corp. (ONTO), BUL
- Profium OY (Profium ), FIN/DEN
- Società consortile a Responsabilità Limitata (CEFRIEL), ITA
- Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo Sociedad Anónima Unipersonal (TID), ESP
Contact Persons
Project Coordinator: Dieter Fensel, LFUI
Scientific Coordinator: Robert Tolksdorf, FUB
Administrative Coordinator: Alice Carpentier, LFUI
Events in connection with TripCom
ESWC 2006 ? 3rd European Semantic Web Conference,
11-14 June 2006,
Budva, Montenegro
Med-e-Tel 2006 - The International Trade Event and Conference for eHealth, Telemedicine and Health ICT 2006,
18-20 April, 2006,
Luxexpo, Luxembourg