BRIDGE: The future of Internet collaboration and interoperation

The development of a new collaborative Grid based ‘Internet of services’ was the primary aim of the BRIDGE project, where this service-oriented approach brings major benefits to a number of important industries.

Solving challenges facing society and business in the 21st Century demands global cooperation and collaboration. From drugs to aeroplanes, product development is increasingly complex and involves large numbers of independent organisations working together in alliances and supply chains across the world. At the heart of successful collaborative working is the use of technology for connectivity and interoperability between people and processes. Over the last 30 years the Internet has shown the value of global connectivity but it is the emerging Internet of Services that will demonstrate the value of service-oriented approaches for collaboration and interoperability.

Using global cooperation in the pharmaceutical, aerospace and meteorology sectors as the business driver, the BRIDGE project worked towards this goal, demonstrating the benefits of service-oriented technology for international cooperation, in particular between Europe and China. A service-oriented interoperability framework has been developed between European and Chinese middleware technologies that allows the execution of distributed workflows with transparent access to distributed data repositories and heterogeneous Grid resources. European sites provide services based on IT Innovation’s GRIA infrastructure and Chinese sites provide services based on CNGrid GOS (GOS). Interoperability focuses on supporting secure and managed distributed collaborations between Chinese and European industrial and academic communities, whilst satisfying the specific needs of the target application sectors.

BRIDGE brought together technologists, engineers and scientists from across the globe to examine issues of collaboration and interoperability. The project demonstrated that by balancing the use of standards with adaptable service-oriented infrastructures can support global collaboration and interoperability for inter-domain Grid applications. BRIDGE’s success is only a beginning for the Internet of Services. The reliance on service-oriented systems will dramatically increase as society and the enterprise endeavour to meet the social, political, environmental and economic challenges of the next decade. Collaboration and interoperability will provide the foundation for success and BRIDGE has made an important step in that direction.

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BRIDGE received research funding from the EC’s Sixth Framework Programme.