Service-oriented computing is now acknowledged as a central paradigm for Internet computing, supported by tremendous research and technology development over the last 10 years. However, the evolution of the Internet, and in particular, the latest Future Internet vision, challenges the paradigm. Indeed, service-oriented computing has to face the ultra large scale and heterogeneity of the Future Internet, which are orders of magnitude higher than those of today’s service-oriented systems. This article aims at contributing to this objective by identifying the key research directions to be followed in light of the latest state of the art. This article more specifically focuses on research challenges for service-oriented middleware design, therefore, investigating service description, discovery, access, and composition in the Future Internet of services.

Formal methods offer an effective means to assert the correctness of software systems through mathematical reasoning. However, the need to formulate system properties in a purely mathematical fashion can create pragmatic barriers to the application of these techniques. For this reason, Dwyer et al. invented property specification patterns which is a system of recurring solutions to deal with the temporal intricacies that would make the construction of reactive systems very hard otherwise. Today, property specification patterns provide general rules that help practitioners to qualify order and occurrence, to quantify time bounds, and to express probabilities of events. Nevertheless, a comprehensive framework combining qualitative, real-time, and probabilistic property specification patterns has remained elusive. The benefits of such a framework are twofold. First, it would remove the distinction between qualitative and quantitative aspects of events; and second, it would provide a structure to systematically discover new property specification patterns. In this paper, we report on such a framework and present a unified catalogue that combines all known plus 40 newly identified or extended patterns. We also offer a natural language front-end to map patterns to a temporal logic of choice. To demonstrate the virtue of this new framework, we applied it to a variety of industrial requirements, and use PSPWizard, a tool specifically developed to work with our unified pattern catalogue, to automatically render concrete instances of property specification patterns to formulae of an underlying temporal logic of choice.

Future Internet research promotes the production of a distributed-computing environment that will be increasingly surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software services that can be composed to meet user needs. Services will be increasingly active entities that, communicating peer-to-peer, can proactively make decisions and autonomously perform tasks. Service choreography is a form of decentralized service composition that describes peer-to-peer message exchanges among participant services from a global perspective. In a distributed setting, obtaining the coordination logic required to realize a choreography is nontrivial and error prone. So, automatic support for realizing choreographies is needed. For this purpose, researchers developed a choreography synthesis tool. The Web extra at http://www.di.univaq.it/marco.autili/synthesis/shortdemo/demo.htm is a short demonstration of CHOReOSynt, a choreography synthesis tool.

Citizens of the digital world are threatened. The digital systems that surround them are increasingly able to make autonomous decisions over and above them and on their behalf. They feel that their moral rights, as well as the social, economic and political spheres, can be affected by the behavior of such systems. Although unavoidable, the digital world is becoming uncomfortable and potentially hostile to its users as human beings and as citizens. Notwithstanding the introduction of the GDPR and of initiatives to establish criteria on software transparency and accountability, users feel vulnerable and unprotected. In this paper we present EXOSOUL, an overarching research framework that aims at building a software personalized exoskeleton that enhances and protects users by mediating their interactions with the digital world according to their own ethics of actions and privacy of data. The exoskeleton disallows or adapts the interactions that would result in unacceptable or morally wrong behaviors according to the ethics and privacy preferences of the users. With their software shield, users will feel empowered and in control, and more in balance of forces with the other actors of the digital world. To reach the breakthrough result of automatically building a personalized exoskeleton, EXOSOUL identifies multidisciplinary challenges never touched before: (i) defining the scope for and inferring citizens ethical preferences; (ii) treating privacy as an ethical dimension managed through the disruptive notion of active data; and (iii) automatically synthesizing ethical actuators, i.e., connector components that mediate the interaction between the user and the digital world to enforce her ethical preferences. In this paper we discuss the research challenges of EXOSOUL in terms of their feasibility and risks.