Foreword

I am glad that the INTEROP-VLab Grand-Sud-Ouest (GSO) pole, which is well known by the international interoperability community for its commitment to advancing the frontiers of interoperability in crisis management, e-Health and Transport, has decided to publish an annual series on Enterprise Interoperability of which the present book is the first opus. And I am grateful for having been invited to write this foreword: this is an honor for the Head of Unit at the European Commission who had the privilege to witness and accompany the development of the founding project - the INTEROP Network of Excellence - and the progress of its remarkable spin-off - the International Virtual Lab for Enterprise Interoperability.

When interoperability became a topic of extensive discussion in the late 1990s, the term was fundamentally referring to the ability to exchange functionality and interpretable data between two software entities. Over the past fifteen years much work has been done on interoperability of applications and software, in particular within Europe that can legitimately claim pride and honor for its achievements. This has been the work of a generation, which will have an enormous impact for years and even decades to come, on the ability to make systems talk to each other.

However, my feeling is that interoperability is the epitome of an unending race between disruptive technological change and relentless modeling and standardization efforts. I will give just two examples.

We know that the future of manufacturing lies in cybermanufacturing (i.e. research in and prototyping of operating systems and applications to create platforms for large-scale manufacturing), biomanufacturing (i.e. basic research at the intersection betweem biology and engineering to revolutionize healthcare) and nanomanufacturing (i.e. basic research at the intersection between chemistry, physics and engineering to manipulate matter at atomic and molecular scales).

We also know that the future of the Internet of Things - empowering trillions of devices (or "Things") to tell us how best to use them - lies in a common platform that works the way the smartphone does today, which requires, in particular, semantic interoperability between architectures, standards and ontologies by design as well as security by design.

The future of manufacturing and the Internet of Things are for me the biggest challenges facing the interoperability community. I am fully aware of how unfair it may look to say that work on interoperability has just begun. So much has been done so well already. Perhaps there are words like interoperability that have a kind of destiny. This is the magic and the tragedy of such words - they have roots that can grow very long but they also have nodes that make it sometimes hard for them to take off and fly where we want them to. I experienced this feeling during the 8 years in the European Commission while managing the eBusiness Unit (which after some years was renamed the Networked Enterprise and Radio Frequency Identification Unit).

I was appointed Head of the eBusiness Unit of European Commission's Directorate-General Information Society and Media (DG INFSO-D/5) on 1 March 2004 during an incredibly interesting and rich period of the European Research Area (integrating, strengthening, structuring). With the Lisbon Strategy and its eEurope action plan (the EU to become the most dynamic and most competitive knowledgebased economy within 10 years), the Barcelona Declaration (education, employment, enlargement) and the Gothenburg objective (sustainability), I inherited a huge and diverse portfolio of projects: 12 Framework Programme 6 (FP6) IST1 projects, 177 Framework Programme 5 (FP5) IST projects and 16 Framework Programme 4 (FP4) ESPRIT projects (whose contracts were not yet closed). The 12 FP6-IST projects were retained by European Commission Decision following the evaluation of the proposals submitted to Call 1 of Strategic Objective 2.3.1.9 "Networked Businesses and Governments". These projects were to be complemented soon by other projects allocated to my unit from FP6-IST Call 2 "Applications and Services for the Mobile User and Worker" (Strategic Objective 2.3.2.6, 2 projects) and the Joint Call between the IST Programme and the Nanotechnology and Nanosciences, Knowledge-based Multifunctional Materials and New Production Processes and Devices (NMP) Programme (Strategic Objective 2.3.3.1, 4 projects).

The proliferation of projects selected from a succession of calls and addressing similar technologies, applications, services and related socio-economic issues, had grim prospects in terms of coherence, effectiveness and impact. Therefore, I decided to organize consultations as a key process between projects. Convinced that it was possible to make the value of the work in this field exceed the value of the individual projects, I invited people and their organizations involved in the new FP6-IST projects to come together and to share their knowledge and experience to their mutual benefit. The main objectives of the consultations were the following: to maximize technological relevance for mid- to long-term R&D work on ICT for Business and support system integration and engineering in specific application areas of strategic interest; to assess socio- and techno-economic factors, regional variations and trends, as well as developments in policy and regulation, in order to interpret their impact on specific R&D actions; to foster pre-normative research, interoperability, benchmarking and best practice; to identify critical success factors for trials and pilot demonstrations; to integrate assessment and technical validation results to ensure that valid results of projects were properly taken into account in the ongoing work of others; to create synergy with Member State activities (in the framework of the European Research Area) and other European programs (Eureka); and finally to stimulate and enhance collaboration on common communication, dissemination and exploitation aspects.

During the Spring of 2004 my unit created four "clusters" of projects to manage consultations, including one on Enterprise Interoperability, initially composed of four projects: ATHENA (integrated project), INTEROP (network of excellence), NO-REST (specific targeted research project) and TRUSTCOM (integrated project). This was the beginning of an 8-year long period of extensive collaboration between EU-funded projects in the field of Enterprise Interoperability (2004-2012) with the work constantly stimulated and assessed by my unit through the regular running of consultation meetings in Brussels.

For the sake of completeness, I need to stress that European interest in Enterprise Interoperability started before I headed the eBusiness Unit and created the cluster. In fact, the work resulted from a road-mapping initiative called IDEAS (in fact a thematic network named Interoperability Developments of Enterprise Applications and Software), launched by DG INFSO in 2000 as a response to repeated requests by European Industry (e.g., Aerospace, Automotive, Manufacturing) to address the issue of the cost of non-interoperability of information technology solutions. Joël Bacquet, Project Officer in the eBusiness Unit, then managed by Jesus Villasante, had initially invited Guy Doumeingts, Professor at University of Bordeaux, to create a Task Force on Enterprise Interoperability in order to assess key issues and report to the Unit research options for tackling them. After two years of extensive discussions, the Task Force composed of fifteen experts completed a review of the state of the art on Enterprise Interoperability and proposed the IDEAS roadmap. I want to express here my gratitude to Joël Bacquet and Guy Doumeingts, two pioneers, for their extraordinary dedication to the European cause, their prolific scientific work, their unfailing drive to tackle problems until they are solved, and of course for their high ability in carrying this endeavor through at a time of great confusion and uncertainty.

Indeed, it was a challenge in 2004 to bring together the various individuals and communities involved in Enterprise Interoperability. The four projects of the cluster, mainly ATHENA2 (industry-driven) and INTEROP3 (academically-driven), had different approaches to the work. Furthermore, several frameworks emerged during the same period, among which: the UK's e-Government Interoperability Framework enabling the seamless flow of information across government/public service organizations (e-GIF, 2000); the European Interoperability Framework developed under the IDABC (now ISA) program (EIF, 2004); the Enterprise Interoperability Centre, originated from ATHENA and established as a not-for-profit legal entity under the Belgian jurisdiction (EIC, 2006); the ATHENA Interoperability Framework for enterprise applications and software systems (AIF, 2007). The Enterprise Interoperability cluster, superbly coordinated in my unit by Arian Zwegers (2004-2005) and Cristina Martinez (2006-2012), and which changed name twice4, played a catalytic role in furthering concertation and consensus thanks to a portfolio of about 30 FP6-IST and FP7-ICT projects by mid-July 2012, i.e. when DG INFSO became DG CONNECT.

The International Virtual Laboratory for Enterprise Interoperability, which celebrates its 10th Anniversary at the same time as this book is published, represents to me the only example of a spin-off of a network of excellence that has exceeded all success standards set by the European Commission thanks to the commendable commitment of its team to...