UT joins ACSI project

TALLINN - The UT Institute of Computer Science (Institute of Computer Sciences of the University of Tartu) is taking part in a multinational business-oriented project called the Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), which aims to reduce the cost of creating industry-specific e-services by 40 percent over conventional techniques. “Nowadays, information systems in large organizations have become highly complex. Thousands of messages float around all over the place, from one part of the system to another. It is often difficult for system engineers to know what is going on,” said Marlon Dumas, professor of software engineering at the Institute.

“As a result, whenever the system needs to undergo changes, for example because new services need to be offered, system engineers spend a lot of time trying to understand how the system is currently working and what exactly needs to be changed,” he adds.

The unique effort of the project focuses on the development of a software framework that will enable organizations to greatly accelerate the typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the automation and efficiency around deploying new e-service blends. Among other advantages, the ACSI framework is anticipated to enable automation of about 90 percent of data transformations needed to support e-service blends. In addition, the ACSI framework will be made available under an open-source license so that organizations around the world can take advantage of the technology.

In this project, UT researchers will apply cutting-edge techniques from a field known as data mining, in order to automatically keep an accurate and up-to-date map of an entire enterprise system. Other partners in the project will develop methods to use this map in order to drastically reduce development times when changes need to be made to an e-service, or when new e-service blends need to be offered.

“This project enables Estonian IT researchers to collaborate with the top universities and R&D organizations in Europe and to bring in know-how and connections that are essential in order to push Estonian IT to the next level,” said Dumas.
In the consortium, UT researchers are collaborating with experts from IBM Research Lab, Haifa; Sapienza Universita degli Studi di Roma, Italy; Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; Imperial College Of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; Indra Software Labs SLU, Spain; Collibra NV, Belgium.

The project started on June 14, during a kick-off meeting at IBM R&D Labs in Haifa, Israel. The project will deliver its final results in May 2013.