Context

With over a billion users, today‘s Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet‘s physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. This is the moment to start designing the Internet of the Future. Its new design should make it possible to connect people and businesses, delibering them not only information but also high-level services; it should allow for accessing and sharing the huge data volume associated to multimedia contents (images, music and sound, videos, and so on); it should make it possible for larger and larger classes of users - also users with a modest technological background - to access and exploit the information, services, and contexts available on-line.

Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Japan, US and Europe are investing heavily in this area. EU is shaping around the idea of the Future Internet its research programmes for the Seventh Framework. EU commissioners, national government ministers, industry leaders and researchers did meet in Bled, Slovenia, in March 2008, to begin developing a manifest of a future internet that will meet Europe‘s needs a decade from now, and beyond. Outside Europe, there are the US long-term programme Future Internet Design - FIND and the experimentation facility Global Environment for Networking Innovations - GENI, both launched bu the NSF; the Japanese project AKARI, launched by NICT – National Institute for Comunications Technologies; the Future Internet Forum in Corea; and many other initiatives. This world-wide movement is accompanied by a the lauch of new international scientific events dedicated to the theme of the future internet, such as the Future Internet Symposium (FIS 2008) and ServiceWave2008.

Description

The research programme Trentino is launching will face the challenges of the Internet of the Future along three dimensions.

The first dimension refers to what the Internet of the future will have to provide; if nowaday's Internet mainly connects computers and Web pages, the Internet of the future will have to become:

• an Internet of Services, where applications live in the network, and data becomes an active entity;
• an Internet of Content & Media, where most of the contents are generated by end-users;
• an Internet of Things, where every electronic device will be an active participant in the network;
• an Internet of People, where the persons can define new social relations, share ideas and projects, work together and participate to the public life.

Even more important, Internet will have to offer the possibility to build networks where people, things, services and content are freely connected and combined in innovative ways.

The second dimension refers to how this network will be realized. indeed Internet will have to overcome the current limits and become:

• an Anywhere and Anytime Internet, that is, a network that will be allways accessible in an efficient way, also for heavy contents and complex services, independently from the device (PC, mobile phone, television, and so on) and from the type of connectivity (wire, WiFi, UMTS, WiMax and so on);
• an Internet for Everybody, which allows to all users to access contents and services without barriers; in particular, Internet will have to support people with limited technical knowledge and limited interactiion capabilities (elderly or disabled people, foreigners, and so on);
• a secure and reliable network, where people and software can guarantee anonymity or traceability, depending on the context, where our privacy is guaranteed and the trust we extend to others can be easily understood and controlled (Internet of Publicity, Privacy and Anonymity).

The third dimensions concerns the usages and the users (the why and whom) of the Internet of the future. Internet will have to support:

• the businesses, which see Internet as their market place, or which use Internet to manage their network of prividers, partners, clients;
• the prosumers, i.e., the persons who will use Internet as a space to create, share, modify and consume context and services;
• the clients & citizen, who will find in Internet services and context which are safe, accurate and of high quality.

These three dimensions will be addressed in an integrated way thorugh Research Projects that we will describe in the following.

From Software Services to a Future Internet of Services

Research in Service Oriented Computing has been based on the idea that software applications can be constructed by composing and configuring “software services”, i.e., software utilities that can be used but that are not necessarily owned by consumers. A key aspect has however been dramatically underestimated in this research, namely the fact that – in most cases – software services are software components that provide electronic access to “real services” (e.g., a software service for travel booking allows us to access the actual service behind it, namely “the possibility of traveling”). Our claim is that the “Internet of Services” should focus on real services, rather than software services. In particular, in this research project we investigate the new role of Internet, which is a supporting infrastructure in the case of software services, but becomes a key enabler for real services, offering a unique capability to communicate in real time changes in real services and allowing for immediate reactions by service consumers. In order tol demonstrate that Internet can become the service delivery platform of the future, the project will address the research challenges this vision produces in the areas of service usage, representation, engineering, and delivery, and will apply these results on pilot projects in the areas of user-centric services and of business centric services.

Further details can be found here.