Towards Adaptive and Composable Services

In complex distributed environments, it is important to achieve high degree of machine-to-machine interaction, not only on a functional, but on a semantic level. Therefore, we propose the NOMADS (Networks of Mobile Adaptive Dependable Systems) Republic, a vision of the future community open to all interested hardware and software entities, and based on adaptive and, if necessary, composable services. One needs very little to become citizen of this Republic: one needs to know how to communicate and to discover, provide and/or use NOMADS services, in an infrastructure that guarantees three basic properties: mobility, adaptivity and dependability. We concentrate on NOMADS services which could potentially provide an unprecedented level of highly adaptive and semantic collaboration. The idea is to hide the complexity of underlying infrastructure from the users, showing only the services they can invoke. This approach promises seamless interoperation. We provide a way to discover not only what services can collaborate with each other on the functional basis, but rather on the semantic basis, meaning which service compositions can produce useful results. This way we are able to offer new services not originally programmed.