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.

The FAST Project plenary meeting was held last week of September, at Kassel University. The main topics analysed during the meeting were the situation and results of the work-packages of the project, the preparation of the User evaluation stage and the summary of the improvements to be included in the deliverables to be released by the end of February 2010

The design of applications has to be done by IT experts who are familiar with programming concepts. That’s not right!

Thanks to the new innovative FAST platform, developed in the course of an EU-funded research project, you are empowered to create your own application within minutes by following the enterprise mashup principle.

The FAST platform allows you:

• To design an enterprise-class application within minutes instead of hours or even days
• To create your own application by reusing existing building blocks in a similar way to the LEGO approach
• To compose seamless company internal and external resources with each other
• To publish the small applications on various environments such as iGoogle, Netvibes, Facebook, EzWeb, iPhone, etc.

You don’t believe it! Please join the FAST evaluation where you will learn more about the innovative enterprise mashup concept. You will create an application for a Business-to-Business (B2B) scenario combining information sources from SAP backend systems with information sources from the Internet.

What do I need? You don’t have to install a software application and no programming experiences are required. Please just start your Firefox browser and take a look at the instruction. In addition, you find videos demonstrating the capabilities of the FAST platform.

<< LET THE ENTERPRISE MASHUP GAME BEGIN >>
The FAST evaluation is now open. So please feel free to forward the link to interested people. http://sites.google.com/site/fastonlinecontest

We are very glad to tell you about the first FAST annual workshop, entitled Open Alliance on Service Front-ends: Developing Technologies, Tools and Vision that will Enable User-Service Interaction in the Future Internet of Services that has been recently organized and chaired by the FAST Project. This workshop took place during the ServiceWave 2008 Conference in Madrid, Spain, on 13th December 2008, immediately after the Future Internet Assembly event organised by the European Commission.

With 250 attendees, ServiceWave attracted a varied and pro-active audience. From lively workshops and industrial panels to innovative scientific papers, from corporate strategies to social events, ServiceWave 2008 achieved its goal of creating an exchange forum across all communities. ServiceWave 2008 has been the first event organised through a collaboration from the European and National Technology Platforms, from Networks of Excellence. And the event lived up to the expectations of this collaboration.

In this excellent context, our workshop gave the opportunity for six European projects (all of them related to service front-ends) to exchange positions on current and emerging related topics, including service mashups, mashup platforms, gadget development tools, mashupable user interfaces, global SOA and so on. The event was celebrated in a lively and friendly atmosphere. It was a great success and a number of alliances and sinergies between the different projects and FAST were identified. Moreover, the FAST Workshop fitted within activities of the EU SSAI Service Front-Ends Collaboration Working Group chaired by FAST as well as the NESSI User Service Front-end Working Group.

The projects presented during the workshop were:

• FAST: our project was introduced to workshop attendees. Main ideas were explained supported by the last version of the gadget visual studio prototype. Both the presentation and the demo raised lots of questions and feedback.
• EzWeb (NESSI’s Strategic Project): the EzWeb project is based on the development of key technologies to be employed in building the front-end layer of a new generation SOA architecture. Among the first technologies developed there is a fully-fledged Mashup Platform capable of collaborative gadget catalogue. It was demonstrated that EzWeb is already capable of deploying a FAST gadget.
• MyMobileWeb (Eureka-CELTIC Flagship Project): MyMobileWeb is a low-cost, modular, open-standards-based, open source software platform that simplifies the development of top-quality mobile web applications and portals, providing an advanced content & application adaptation environment.
• InContext (EU FP6 Project): The inContext project is aimed at developing a novel scientific approach to the problem of enabling diverse individual knowledge workers in separate organizations to work in effective team collaboration with one another. The end result of the research will emphasize P2P collaboration software capabilities.
• ICT-OPEN (EU FP7 Project): The objective of OPEN is to provide users with migratory interactive services, which enable users to change interaction platform while continuing their tasks through an interface adapted to the new context in which it will be used.
• ServFace (EC FP7 Project): The project ServFace will extend service-oriented architecture concepts with an integrated approach of user interface description and development by introducing the notion of a correspondent user interface for services.

You can find more information about the workshop here. Follow the links to download the workshop leaflet or to watch the demo video.

Some pictures of the event…

The 2nd FAST Plenary meeting, hosted by the UPM, took place on June 25-27 in Madrid. The members of the consortium gathered and discussed the current status of the activities of the project and set the guidelines for future action. There were a number of presentations and discussions as well as reports on the progress on each one of the fronts of FAST in a lively and friendly atmosphere. We took the opportunity to get to know new members of the team and also aligned our ideas to successfully tackle the coming challenges of FAST.

There were parallel activities that complemented our time in Madrid. One or more representatives of each FAST partner attended the Service Front End Collaboration Working Group Meeting (led by FAST) on Tuesday 24 and part of them went to the EzWeb Workshop hosted by the FP6 Project OPUCE on Thursday 26.