Achieving a Pan-European service infrastructure

Abstract

This paper presents a view on what still is to be achieved in the Pan-European Service Infrastructure in order for Europe to have in place an integrated broadband information and communication system. The problems and issues discussed are considered as being of two types: technology and construction. Important technology issues are that the service infrastructure should assure that services are able to be introduced as easily and efficiently as possible, that services are able to cooperate with other services, and that services are not able to interfere with other services. Important construction issues are to provide a support infrastructure, and to assure that a sufficient set of services are created and offered, that the set is well integrated with the different services able to cooperate when desired, that the set is well managed, that the services are usable and able to be accessed, and, finally, that the system can provide value to the users and profit to the service providers. The papers in this book show that most problems and issues dealing with technology are solved. Building the software still presents a formidable challenge, however. It is proposed that a way to ease the challenge is to divide and conquer — to reduce to the minimum the building of universal architectures, but to build services and associated architectures within individual subsets of services, each subset having some community of common interests and characteristics.