by Jesús Villasante, European Commission, DG Information Society and Media, Head of Software & Service Architectures and Infrastructures Unit.

The evolution towards a service-based economy represents today more than 70% of the GDP in developed countries. This evolution is expected to continue and to influence our lifestyle in the coming decades but the full potential of the service-based economy can only be grasped if it builds on new technologies for the design, development and operation of new services and service platforms.

by Jana Koehler and Gustavo Alonso

Service-oriented computing is an emerging cross-disciplinary paradigm for distributed computing, which is changing the way software applications are designed, delivered and consumed. At the heart of service-oriented computing are services that provide autonomous, platform-independent, computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols to build networks of collaborating applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries.