| ASSIST 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). |
