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.