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Applied Science of Services for Information Society Technologies (ASSIST)
This SRO is based on two predecessor SROs, namely A-Services Internet and eHealth.
A-SI addressed research topics like service architectures, service infrastructures and context-aware service provisioning in numerous externally funded research projects at national and European level. Several application domains were targeted, but the health domain was clearly more visible than others. There has been a major effort in positioning A-SI research within the ICT theme of the BSIK program. This effort was successful, resulting in various projects on service architectures and health applications (e.g. A-MUSE, AWARENESS).
E-health addressed topics relevant in the development of innovative ICT services for improved and integrated healthcare. It has focused on core technical issues, but has considered societal, legal and business aspects, too. While in the past, much emphasis was put on telemedicine, the research scope has recently been broadened in order to strengthen multi- and inter-disciplinary research as well, and to provide a better basis for knowledge transfer and valorization. Research efforts were embodied in externally funded research projects at a national level (e.g., BioRange) and European level (e.g., MobiHealth, HealthService24).
Both SROs stimulated and facilitated the organization of scientific events, which resulted in several recognized international conferences, workshops and symposia with high visibility (e.g., the IEEE EDOC Conference in 2005 and the MNT Symposium in 2006).
RESEARCH agenda and scientific goals
This SRO addresses research in service architectures and software infrastructures fostering innovative, open and cost-effective solutions for health and other application areas.
Services have become a strategic capability for industry and society. A service consumer selects a service, or a set of services, which meet his business needs; generally, he does not own the service and therefore need not be concerned with ownership issues such as provision of a service infrastructure, use of the right technology to implement the services, integration of legacy systems, and service maintenance. Services are enabled by software; problems which arise from ownership are therefore a major concern in service software development, especially since the software infrastructure is generally distributed and comprises many heterogeneous technology platforms.
One important application domain in which the full potential of ICT has not yet been realized is health. Examples of fundamental problems in this domain to which service architectures could provide significant solutions are: (i) interoperability of healthcare systems (i.e., sharing health information and connecting health with non-health applications); (ii) easy access to healthcare applications and information (i.e., technology-transparent use of health services); (iii) system agility (i.e., situation-driven composition of health services); (iv) business process support (i.e., process-centered composition of health services); and (v) self-/tele-care (i.e., personalized mobile health services exploiting ambient intelligence).
