After three exciting years, the FAST project now finally comes to a close. From the start, our goal was to put the tools to create small but complex Web applications – call them enterprise mashups or situational widgets or gadgets – directly into the hands of end users, without having to rely on programmers and developers to do the job for them. Looking back at everything now, we feel that our work was very successful: we did the research, the design and the development to produce these tools, and we spent significant efforts to test and evaluate them, focussed a lot on usability, and made sure they really work for the people who should use them. If you want to see for yourself, have a look at a recent blog post about FAST in a Nutshell, or just dive right in and try out our demo!

Marking the end of the project, we have also released the final version of our regular newsletter, which will give you more details about the latest developments in our toolset (such as debugging features, improved deployment and semantics-based recommendation features), a wrap-up of recent dissemination activities, and a complete list of all scientific publications done during the course of the project.

So, what is next for FAST? While the official project duration is over, we expect our tools and research to be carried on in other contexts now. E.g., to mention a number of follow-up projects that FAST consortium mebers are involved in: in the 4Caast Project, FAST-created gadgets can either play the role of an application provider, or the FAST platform can be used to assist the mashing-up of different applications. Similarly, the Cloud4SOA project can apply the technology and lessons learned for semantic interoperability of application components in FAST. On the other hand, projects such as Puzzled by Policy will be able to apply the FAST platform (or a derivative) to empower citizens to make better use of public sector data and services.

Goodbye FAST – Long live FAST!

Tomorrow, 24/11/2009, the Workshop on User-generated Services (UGS2009) will take place at ICSOC2009 in Stockholm, Sweden. The workshop extends the notion of user-generated content, which is at the heart of the Web2.0 paradigm, to services. Can end users be empowered not only to contribute content to the Web, but to define their own, personalised working environment, creating and adapting functionality and services to their own needs?The workshop is co-organised and sponsored by the FAST project, and among others features two presentations by FAST members. Also, there will be an invited talk on the Open Alliance for Service Front Ends, for which FAST was one of the founding members.

About a year ago, when the project had just started, the FAST consortium met for the first time in Madrid and set out to create something new and fresh which would revolutionise the way gadgets and widgets are created and used nowadays. From those first steps to the final result we will be busy for three long years. Now that the first year has just passed, we would like to take a moment and reflect upon what has happened so far.

Like most projects in their first year, much of the effort was dedicated to coming up with the analysis and specifications which will lay the foundation for the future development, and make sure that the whole team is working with a common understanding and towards a common goal. In this respect, we have looked at and evaluated a lot of the current state-of-the-art and defined the conceptual model for FAST. The first version of the FAST gadget ontology has been made public. We are particularly proud that, even in this first year, we have already released two software prototypes. The two prototypes – the front-end Gadget Visual Storyboard (GVS) and the back-end Semantic Catalogue – are like the two flip sides of a coin and together make up the FAST platform. The GVS prototype allows you to interact as an end-user with a first version of our tool and compose your own gadget using a fixed set of parts (“screens”) already provided. With the Semantic Catalogue prototype, you can get your hands dirty using the catalogue API as specified in its technical documentation.

Also during the first year, some work has already been done with regards to the experimentation and validation of the project, specifying and designing a set of scenarios which will allow the testing of our prototypes and will be a good indicator to help us to assess which direction we must take in the future.

Finally, in order to spread the word, we have created and regularly updated the website you are reading right now, have distributed periodic newsletters, published several scientific papers at well-known international conferences and hosted our first FAST workshop in conjunction with the ServiceWave2008 conference.

The complete list of all public documents – state-of-the-art analyses, specifications, scenarios, methodologies, architecture, etc. – are available on the FAST web site.