About m:Ciudad
The main innovations in m:Ciudad are:
- A new flexible service description for mobile user-generated micro services.
- A new creation and editing method to create new U+ services from the mobile device, encouraging user-generated-services.
- A new point of view for knowledge provision and service creation based on the prosumer (producer + consumer) concept.
- A new embedded execution platform for mobile devices, to execute U+ services.
- An optimised searching environment to locate and access relevant services providing relevant knowledge.
The project methodology is based on a waterfall approach, ranging from an early identification and selection of scenarios and business cases to the final evaluation of the technical approaches taken for the m:Ciudad tools and frameworks. The first part of the project is generating, during the first year, the models and Service Description Language; the second part of the project, during the last two years, generates the associated tools; those tools evolve from supporting basic functionalities to more complex ones. The work is developed in a sequential way, as it is expected to have a clear formal description of services and their associated procedures (i.e., publishing, searching) at the end of the first stage, enough for starting the associated tools. Future improvements in service functionalities will be incorporated in the tools in an incremental way (in a very similar way that web browsers did in the past).
Consistently with this methodology, the project has 8 Work Packages, that reflects the logical phases of the project cycle in order to achieve the proposed objectives, and also includes the management of the project and assessment of progress and results:
- WP1 serves as a common starting point for the project, to define the detailed project scope and detailed functional requirements. The use cases, scenarios, and business model analysis lead to a set of requirements and the overall architecture.
- WP2 defines what an m:Ciudad micro-service (or U+ service) is, specifying the best possible way of representing/describing a micro-service to be used in the m:Ciudad landscape and to serve as the base for m:Ciudad tools design.
- WP3 designs and develops the necessary editing tools for U+ service creation, the service repository for sharing and downloading existing U+ services and the deployment methods for service installation and starting up procedures.
- WP4 elaborates the U+ service embedded platform which allows for the execution of micro services as well as the interfaces for invoking local and remote physical/communication capabilities.
- WP5 deals with the publishing and discovery tools of micro-services as they are defined in WP2 and provides enablers that allow implementing the business models as identified in WP1.
- WP6 features U+ services that work across the entire platform, experimenting, adjusting and validating that each component works correctly and is correctly integrated in m:Ciudad.
- WP7 creates the path for an effective exploitation of project results. Three axes are considered: standardisation, dissemination of project advances and exploitation plan.
- WP8 includes all tasks that are related to the management of the project.
The general structure of the project work plan is depicted in the follow figure. This project structure intends not only to achieve the expected goals but also to minimise all the risk factors associated with these technologies, in order to guarantee the project success.
