The competitiveness of the modern nations and that of the European states in particular leans on the technological development and the use of networked facilities. The advent of the traditional internet was a gigantic leap in the working habits and procedures in the organisations. However, the original model is depleting and the growing demands of bandwidth and complexity of services required hint that there must be a breakthrough in the infrastructure of the Internet soon. Acknowledging this fact, the EC do not want to lag behind the technological development but to lead the change to position Europe in a favourable situation to face the challenges of the future. Hence, the EC has made an appeal to European wide action to ensure the competiveness of the ICT sector in Europe. The conference recently held in BLED, hosted by the Slovenian Government is a first step to start building this initiative.
General Information
Links
-
Tag cloud
BLED Conference deliverables documentation european commission FAST kick-off madrid meeting partners press room project objectives project story prototype publication tool
RSS
Fast and Advanced Storyboard Tools (FAST) Project
FAST aims at providing an innovative visual programming environment that will facilitate the development of next-generation composite user interfaces. It constitutes a novel approach to application composition and business process definition from a top-down user-centric perspective.For a quick overview of FAST, please refer to the project factsheet
FAST is a Small or Medium-scale Focused Research Collaborative Project (STREP) supported by the European Commission under its 7th Framework Programme (FP7). It is among the first batch of FP7 projects on Services and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering. FAST started on 1st March 2008 and will come to an end officially on 31th March 2011. It has a total funding of €3,5 M (overall budget €5,5 M)
Project Overview
The main objective of the project is to create a new a visual programming environment that will facilitate the development of complex front-end gadgets, involving execution of relatively complex business processes that rely on back-end semantic Web services. The approach adopted will be user-centric rather than program-centric: instead of first building programs that orchestrate available semantic Web services and then try to figure out how to implement interaction with the users at given points of the process execution flow, programmers will start from the front-end gadgets that the user will see and interact with, and then, afterwards, they will visually establish the connection to back-end Web services going through process execution flows if necessary. The way programmers will visually establish this connection will follow an approach similar to what sequence diagrams in UML look like.
Project Stories
In the context of Digital Administration, citizens expect to easily locate and manage most of their administrative procedures –like tax payments, tax declarations or administration issues– by themselves, thanks to government Web portals and services. However, most transactions and tasks demand recurrent browsing, searching and discovering through a variety of websites and services allocated in disparate government portals. These tasks imply the performance of an implicit process flow. All this disparate information and functionalities would be more useful and valuable if they were presented together in a unique mashup-based interface. However, the achievement of these goals would require dynamic mashup-based user interfaces made up of a number of screens and support for the underlying process flow, which is a tough task with no help of specifically tailored visual development environments suitable for modelling such a powerful mashup and for deploying it on current mashup platforms.
By overcoming all these constraints, FAST will provide current and future mashup platforms with more powerful gadgets, so that they can allow people to agilely interact with administration, thus considerably simplifying their daily lives.
Attached you can find the Kick-off Meeting Agenda, which is being held on March 13-14 at Telefonica I+D Headquarters.
A page for the FP7 Call 1 projects on Software & Services has been created and is on-line at the following address: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/projects_en.html
The first version of the FAST Project Story (or FAST flyer) has been sent to the European Commission. It includes a two-page description of the Project, including objectives, potential impact and a case study.
Here you can find it in PDF format.
The FAST project kick-off meeting is going to be held on March 13-14. The meeting will be held at Telefonica I+D headquarters in Madrid, 6th Emilio Vargas St.
