ECSS White Paper on Software and Service Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering
ECSS White Paper is the result of a study carried out within the 3S Project (Strategy for Software & Services within the European Research Area) starting on 1st July 2006. “European Commission White Papers are documents containing proposals for Community action in a specific area. In some cases they follow a Green Paper published to launch a consultation process at European level. When a White Paper is favourably received by the Council, it can lead to an action programme for the Union in the area concerned.” (Source EUROPA Glossary) In September 2007, the 3S Consortium released the 3S Green Paper on Software and Service Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering. It compiled several challenges which the European Union had to face up to, in order to support the strong development of flexible and distributed computing technology and to sustain the innovation pace of software services development. In accordance with the definition of White Paper reported above, the ECSS White Paper is the result of the 3S Green Paper opening to a wide public consultation with the outstanding participation of the European Community for Software and Software Services - Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (ECSS, www.eu-ecss.eu) built by the project itself, and of the 3S Advisory Board, an exclusive group of high level experts in the Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering field (SSAI). The group included a balanced mix of academic experts, industrialists, researchers and policy making stakeholders but also involved representatives of the most relevant initiatives in the SSAI sector in Europe and at international level, as well as some representatives from the European Commission. A relevant part in the discussion of the topics covered in the White Paper was played by two workshops organized in September 2007 and April 2008. All the inputs collected and discussed for the Green Paper are now gathered and further developed in the document we are here presenting, ECSS White paper. The ECSS White Paper aims at supporting the EC to push the European SSAI to a competitive position worldwide identifying strategies and technologies that will facilitate future developments and reduce the fragmentation that mostly characterizes the panorama of the European Software and Services area. The ECSS White paper is structured in two volumes. The first volume represents the executive part of the document and it is expressed in the form of sixteen recommendations addressed to the EC, so to achieve the described aims. The second one includes all background texts related to the recommendations given, and it aims at becoming the thinking arena for future discussions on actions needed for the future of ICT, Society and Industry in Europe. Recommendations are classified in two categories: Research Topics and Policy-oriented Recommendations. The former category includes six critical research topics addressed to the EC in order to introduce the suggestions resulting from the consultation process as the basis for the industrial competitiveness in the Software & Services domain. The latter consists of ten policy-oriented recommendations varying in relation to research topics; some are more technical and others more focused on legal or regulatory issues, while some could be even considered a bit philosophical. Nonetheless, security and trust issues represent a horizontal theme to all the recommendations as they undoubtedly have a clear relation to current needs, demands or worries coming from industry and end-users. To read ECSS White Paper visit this webpage: http://www.eu-ecss.eu/documentation/ecss-documentation The White Paper has been presented to a wide audience made of representatives from the Government, Academia and Industry sectors in the occasion of the SSOKU09 conference, the first European Conference on Software Services and SOKU technologies jointly organised by the 3S and CHALLENGERS projects which took place on 13-14 January 2009 at the Diamant Conference Centre, Brussels, Belgium. Participants at the event have shown a great interest in the recommendations presented in the White Paper and the document was valued as the guideline to the trends of the future of the European Software & Services. Our desire is that the White Paper remains alive, for the benefit of the European competitiveness in the area. For this purpose, the ECSS website (ECSS, www.eu-ecss.eu) will be kept as an open channel through which it will be possible to sustain discussions towards the future of sector.
Keywords
Software & Services
Countries
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom