Future Internet Apps: The Next Wave of Adaptive Service-Oriented Systems?

The Future Internet will emerge through the convergence of software services, things, content, and communication networks. Service-orientation is expected to play a key role as enabling technology that allows the provisioning of hard- and software entities and contents as services. The dynamic composition of such services will enable the creation of service-oriented systems in the Future Internet (FI Apps), which will be increasingly provided by third parties. Together with increased expectations from end-users for personalization and customization, FI Apps will thus face an unprecedented level of change and dynamism. Based on our understanding of adaptive service-oriented systems, this paper discusses the key adaptation characteristics for FI Apps (illustrated by a concrete application domain). The importance of each of those characteristics has been empirically assessed by means of a survey study. We provide the results of this study which can help in better understanding where future research and development effort should be invested.