COIN: Platform and Services for SaaS in Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration

COIN aims at delivering an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support enterprises to face future Internet uptake: in the future services will become an invisible, pervasive and self-adaptive knowledge and business utility at disposal of enterprises from any industrial sector and domain. Among this services, collaboration and interoperability services will pay a key role to enable creation of networks among enterprises in a such flexible and dynamic way that will enable to quick adapt enterprises to market changes and make them more competitive. In this paper we present the COIN vision, and its building blocks the head of the coin, i.e. enterprise collaboration (EC) services, the tail of the coin, i.e. enterprise interoperability (EI) services, the metal forging them together, the generic service platform (GSP), and its market value, the software as a service-utility (SaaS-U) paradigm. Such vision can be achieved only through semantics. Semantics is the key enabler for supporting interoperability among the different services to be provided through the platform and to enable decoupling between the enterprise perspective and the ICT perspective. Thus COIN generic service platform leverage on semantic technologies by implementing a semantically-enabled service-oriented architecture (SESA).