Building the SRA – a continuously evolving process

The Strategic Research Agenda translates the vision of NESSI into strategic research directions. It is organised in 3 different volumes, with volume 1 designed to frame the general context, volume 2 focusing on the strategy to build NESSI while the 3rd volume, which is updated on a regular basis, details the strategic research directions.

In 2010, NESSI decided to evolve both its vision and its SRA, focusing mainly on the 3rd volume but encompassing also the context evolution represented by the smart services for a digital society.

The SRA revision process is currently on-going; it was launched in September 2010 with a workshop held at ICT 2010 in Brussels, followed by an online contribution phase that ended with the workshop held at ServiceWave 2010 in Ghent. The updated draft will be published in February 2011, and open for a final online revision period before issuing the 2011 revision. A draft vision document was issued in parallel in October 2010.

All documents are available for download under our Publications section – Research page.

Implementing the SRA – through NEXOF, the NESSI Research structure and the NESSI Open Innovation environment

As detailed in the NESSI Open Innovation Environment page, the strategy to build NESSI focused from 2007 to 2010 on NEXOF – the NESSI Open Services Reference Framework. This strategy was supported through interlinked research projects organised through the NESSI Research Structure.

With the evolution of NEXOF and its supporting project NEXOF-RA, NESSI reached important results –a reference architecture, a complete set of patterns and three different contexts (Enterprise SOA, Internet of Services and Cloud and IaaS). It also reached another, equally important, conclusion – the fact that building a single reference implementation of a service framework across different application contexts is not realistic.

Taking these elements into account, NESSI evolved its strategy as detailed in the NESSI Open Innovation Environment page; in this evolution, NESSI retains the important results of NEXOF and will sustain its continuation including the open contribution calls, the proof of concepts, the NEXOF repository and the NESSI research structure.
All these elements are key in supporting the implementation and the coherence of the NESSI vision as expressed in the Strategic Research Agenda.