This paper describes the recent history of the communication technology innovations in the Netherlands, it describes the establishments and spearheads of the research community in the Freeband program (www.freeband.nl) and expresses the lines and ambitions for future developments and research. Distinguishing feature of Freeband is the collaborative development between industry and academia leading to clear focus and excellence in applications, context awareness and high-speed technologies. We argue that joint R&D programs with public private cooperation can work if they build on a shared vision. As such they can lead to centers of excellence international positioning and a strong knowledge base. We also argue that a focus shift is at hand from defining only research in technological areas to defining research for problems that arise in practical deployments and up scaling from lab environments.

In this paper we propose an approach for the integration of functional models with non-functional models in the context of model-driven e-service development. Starting from the observation that current approaches to model-driven development have a strong focus on functionality, we argue the necessity of including non-functional aspects, as early as possible in the service design process, from the architectural (computational independent) level through all MDA layers. Furthermore, we distinguish between two modelling spaces (orthogonal to the MDA view), the design space and the analysis space, which could be integrated by means of model transformations. Thus, relating the analysis results to the original design models can be achieved by following a sequence of steps that entail horizontal model-to-model transformations from the design space to the analysis space, vertical model-to-model transformations (within and between the MDA layers) and proprietary analysis techniques that are used for the derivation of required (quantitative) properties. This provides a framework for incorporating nonfunctional analysis into methodological support for e-service development.

Service orientation is a new paradigm, not only for software engineering but also for the broader topic of enterprise architecture. This chapter studies the relevance and impact of the service concept and service orientation to the discipline of enterprise architecture. It provides ideas on how to set up a service-oriented enterprise architecture. It is argued that a service-oriented approach to enterprise architecture provides better handles for architectural alignment and business and IT alignment, in particular.

In this paper we present a Web services-based platform that facilitates and speeds up the development and deployment of context-aware, integrated mobile speech and data applications. The platform is capable of handling different types of context and offers sophisticated personalization mechanisms. To illustrate the usefulness of the platform and to validate the claim that cross-platform application development, in particular mobile, context-aware applications is easier and faster with Web services technologies, we present a demonstration application. It serves tourists with interesting information and services in their specific context, and contributes to the achievement of their current goals. Finally, we present a number of problems that we experienced in the implementation process as well as the feedback that we received from real users who tested our application.

Enterprise architecture focuses on modelling different domains relevant for businesses or organisations. A major issue is how to express and maintain the relations between different modelling domains. Current architectural support focuses mainly on modelling techiques and language for single domains. For enterprise architectures it is important to have the flexibility to create cross domain models and views in which inter-relations are made explicit. Therefore, a language for enterprise architecture models should pay particular attention to the relations between domain models. In this paper we present a general approach to derive an operator that allows for the composition of relations in architecture description languages. This general approach opens the door for a number of interesting application areas, two of which are worked out in more detail: the creation of more modelling flexibility, by allowing to leave out certain details, and automated abstraction and complexity reduction of models facilitating stakeholder-specific visualisations. For a specific enterprise architecture modelling language, we explicitly derive this composition operator. Because of the specific properties of this operator, the transitive closure of the metamodel of this language can be determined.

In this paper we discuss trust services in e-business. Although the importance of trust for business transactions is generally recognized, the actual mechanism of trust is not well understood. This hampers the development and use of effective trust services, aiming at supporting business transactions between partners all over the world. In this paper, we model the amount of uncertainty in a decision process as a function of information. Trust is unambiguously linked to the remaining uncertainty and information provisioning. Trust services are defined as services aimed at reducing uncertainty through providing relevant information. Finally, a categorisation of trust services based on different types of information and phases in a business transaction is presented.

Providing an easy-to-use service framework for mobile context-aware applications is a real challenge. This paper describes how context information in mobile 3G networks can be unlocked via web services. We describe a service framework that builds on top of these web services, to enable the rapid development of applications that are aware of the context of the end-user, are able to reason with context information and to serve the end-user with an offering of functionality and services that are relevant for him or her as a unique individual in a specific context, e.g. role, location or activity.

The parallel performance of an implicit solver for the Euler equations on a structured grid is discussed. The flow studied is a two-dimensional transonic flow around an airfoil. The spatial discretization involves the MUSCL scheme, a higher-order Total Variation Diminishing scheme. The solver described in this paper is an implicit solver that is based on quasi Newton iteration and approximate factorization to solve the linear system of equations resulting from the Euler Backward scheme. It is shown that the implicit time-stepping method can be used as a smoother to obtain an efficient and stable multigrid process. Also, the solver has good properties for parallelization comparable with explicit time-stepping schemes. To preserve data locality domain decomposition is applied to obtain a parallelizable code. Although the domain decomposition slightly affects the efficiency of the approximate factorization method with respect to the number of time steps required to attain the stationary solution, the results show that this hardly affects the performance for practical purposes. The accuracy with which the linear system of equations is solved is found to be an important parameter. Because the method is equally applicable for the Navier-Stokes equations and in three-dimensions, the presented combination of efficient parallel execution and implicit time-integration provides an interesting perspective for time-dependent problems in computational fluid dynamics.

The Living Labs concept is emerging, and seems appropriate for in-situ research. In this article, experiences of two Dutch Living Labs named Freeband and Kenniswijk are presented and reflected upon to motivate the current debate on experience and applications research. From the Kenniswijk and Freeband initiatives we have gained the insight that combining both approaches into one intelligent large-scale real-life environment provides an unobtrusive high quality environment in which usage of (novel) application can be validated. Such a future Living Lab raises new challenges and asks for new methods of data collecting and data analysis.