Towards the Internet of Services: the Theseus Research Program ― The Theseus Program

The Internet of Services and the Internet of Things are major building blocks of the Future Internet. The digital enterprise of the future is based not only on mobile, social, and cloud technologies, but also on se-mantic technologies and the future Internet of Everything. Semantic technologies now enable mass cus-tomization for the delivery of goods and services that meet individual customer needs and tastes with near mass production efficiency and reliability. This is creating a competitive advantage in the industrial econ-omy, the service economy, and the emerging data economy, leading to smart products, smart services, and smart data, all adaptable to specific tasks, locations, situations, and contexts of smart spaces. Such tech-nologies allow us to describe, revise, and adapt the characteristics, functions, processes, and usage patterns of customization targets on the basis of machine-understandable content representation that enables auto-mated processing and information sharing between human and software agents.

This book explains the principal achievements of the Theseus research program, one of the central pro-grams in the German government's Digital 2015 initiative and its High-Tech Strategy 2020. The methods, toolsets, and standards for semantic technologies developed during this program form a solid basis for the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), the hybrid service economy, and the transformation of big data into useful smart data for the emerging data economy.

The contributing authors are leading scientists and engineers, representing world-class academic and in-dustrial research teams, and the ideas, technologies, and representative use cases they describe in the book derive from results in multidisciplinary fields, such as the Internet of Services; the Semantic Web, and semantic technologies, knowledge management, and search; user interfaces, multimodal interaction, and visualization; machine learning and data mining; and business process support, manufacturing, automa-tion, medical systems, and integrated service engineering.

The book will be of value to both researchers and practitioners in these domains.

Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University, Saarbrucken. He was the Scientific Director of the Verbmobil consortium on spontaneous speech translation, the Smart Kom consortium on multimodal dialog systems and the Smart Web consortium on mobile multimodal access to semantic web services. He was awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Award) in 2001 and he received the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006. He is the Chief Academic Advisor for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the Research Union of the German Government and he is a member or chair of many key international scientific advisory and governance boards and a member of many academies. He has chaired and given invited talks at the key international conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence; he is a board member of the key AI journals; he is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and the Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI) and he received the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award at IJCAI-13, the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, in recognition of his substantial contributions, as well as his extensive service to the field of artificial intelligence throughout his career. His research interests include multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, semantic web services, semantic product memories and cyber-physical production systems.