Coordinator: Prof. Kostas Magoutis

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is the new cross-disciplinary paradigm for distributed computing that is changing the way software applications are designed, architected, delivered and consumed. It is intended to facilitate business collaboration and application integration at a global scale. Services are autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, formally specified, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols for the purpose of developing massively distributed interoperable applications organized in the form of a network of collaborative components functioning within or across organization borders.

ISL activities in the domain of SOC target the following research and development activities:

• formal description languages providing enriched service behavior specification primitives;
• formal methods for complex service verification building on logic-based formalisms;
• semantically-enriched service discovery and matchmaking mechanisms employing semantic similarity measures for matching functional goals and non-functional requirements;
• composition languages offering flexible, effective and verifiable integration of service-oriented applications;
• automated service negotiation and service provisioning methodologies tailored to the distribution model (peer-to-peer and grid-aware service provisioning, cloud computing, software as a service);
• design for adaptability and
• monitoring for adaptation to changing context.