The overall ambition of NESSI is to deliver NEXOF, a coherent and consistent open service framework leveraging research in the area of service-based systems to consolidate and trigger innovation in service-oriented economies.

• NESSI Open Reference Model: an open specification, which includes the conceptual model of the core elements that enable service-based ecosystems and their relationship as well as underlying rules, principles and policies which lead to interoperable implementations. Core elements include business dynamics, development environment and operational environment.
•  NESSI Open Reference Architecture addressing definition and selection of innovative architectural styles and patterns based on the reference model. Our overall ambition being here to pave the way towards a standardized Open Reference Architecture for services and components but also to some extent processes which corresponds to a significant advancement of today’s service-oriented architectures (even service-component ones). This will include the definition of the infrastructure requirements.
•  NESSI Open Reference Implementation taking the responsibility to deliver to the community at large with the implementation of the NEXOF concepts and approaches where the openness, built on open source and open standards, encompasses three important concepts:
  • open leading to free usage by other players
  • open guaranteeing the rights for others to derive new commercial implementations
  • open for all to participate.

The delivery of the NESSI Open Reference Implementation (including tools and methods) in an open source environment is key for the NESSI approach to be tested and to gain momentum in various communities of potential users and to address and serve the development of a service-oriented economy.

 It is important to specify that in our use of the terms “open source”, we refer to the licensing model as opposed to the development process, where other schemes are adequate alternatives. Furthermore, the licensing scheme must allow derivative works.

 These three core elements are complemented with NEXOF’s Test and Validation Suite to allow all future instances of NEXOF to be validated for coherence and consistency with respect to NEXOF principles as specified in both NEXOF Reference Model and NEXOF Reference Architecture.

 In moving forward, NEXOF is the central element from which

• industry will be able to derive commercial environments
• academia will be able to further advance the state of the art and feed back innovation into industrialized processes
• users will be able to invest in technology while at the same time protecting their investment from incompatible paradigm shifts. Indeed, NESSI’s ambition is to combine both interoperability and new evolutions in subsequent implements of NEXOF.

The initial description of NEXOF’s architecture will be included in the 2nd volume of the SRA, due in Q4 2007. This architecture is also the central point around which NESSI is driving the coordination of research efforts.