Articles

Semosa

Eureka Itea 2 no10006 - Avanza I+D TSI-020400-2011-51

Single European Mobile Services Area

SEMOSA will make important contributions in the following areas: It will provide an open platform and tools for mobile application developers, and service providers, therefore creating a common platform, and it will address European interoperability of important services such as m-payments and ticketing.

Mobile Application developers must be able to provide solutions for one of the widest possible but also most fragmented markets: The Single European Mobile Services Area.  With the aid of tools and standardized access to services on trusted platforms and operators, they should be able to do this rapidly and painlessly. This is only possible with a platform that is open and provides standardized interfaces to services that are interoperable. SEMOSA helps both the application developers and the service providers by providing a simple and single reference implementation that works with a large number of operators. The SEMOSA reference platform should also help with the goal of establishing existing, open mobile standards and initiatives among developers, operators and manufacturers, thereby reducing fragmentation and benefiting the whole industry

A focus is put on NFC-based services. The NFC technology is the enabler for an intensive interaction of the real and the virtual world. Therefore, many services, like m-ticketing, require complex infrastructures and ecosystems. Taking m-ticketing for transportation as an example, each local (or at least national) transportation provider requires its own ecosystem which involves many different stakeholders like the transport provider, the ticket processing supplier, the mobile network operator, the trusted service manager etc. Due to its complexity, there will not be a global ecosystem lead by a single player but rather smaller ecosystems. But innovative NFC-based services require interaction of services which have separated ecosystems (f.e. M-Payments with M-ticketing). SEMOSA is addressing the challenge of providing an interface between such ecosystems.

On behalf of trusted services, there will be a special focus on mobile payment services. Almost every commercial service requires some sort of payment for its usage. Therefore, payment is the key trusted service for a broad acceptance of SEMOSA. Our aim is to separate the commercial service and the payment process. Hence, the service and the payment are different applications which interact over interfaces of the SEMOSA platform. The end user can choose the payment application with which he prefers to pay for the commercial service he uses. The service application developer does not have to care about the payment process but should simply use the SEMOSA interface for payment processing. In terms of security, the data of the user like account data, credit card number, address etc. is protected by the payment application provider, f.e. a bank, and there is no need to share this data with the commercial service provider. Having the SEMOSA interface, different payment providers can offer their services to the end user. Taking a real world example, an end user can pay in any supermarket (the commercial service provider) without any registration at the cashier and he can use the credit/debit card of his preferred payment application supplier (e.g. a bank) for the payment. For mobile and internet services in today’s world the end user has to register first to use a service and give secure data to the commercial service provider. The target of SEMOSA is to change this so that the end user can use a mobile service as easy and safe as he can buy products in the supermarket with cash or credit cards.

SEMOSA targets open source common foundations for a mobile applications and services platform which is able to offer interoperability of applications and operator services in large diversity of co-operating Software Intensive Systems (SISs).  The platform will enable:

  • An open framework of APIs and/or middleware on the mobile phone. The platform will accommodate There is no back end required to use the open platform and be open to any backend service that complies with the open specifications.
  • (Reference and exemplary implementations of platform specifications/definitions /such as trusted service managers)
  • Reference implementation of platform specifications for m-payments service infrastructure and for payment applications (use cases, business processes, trusted service management, interfaces, security issues) which can be accessed over the open platform
  • Rapid development of build mobile device applications and gadgets that are based on new open mobile standards and services
  • Mobile applications that can connect, adapt and exchange information and services with their environment using NFC (near field communications)
  • A dynamic trusted applications platform for SIM cards
  • Service retrieval from external centralised/distributed repositories
  • Interoperability of services such as m-payments and m-ticketing
  • The connection between various vertical markets in order to allow for newbusiness solutions
  • Pilot systems that demonstrate the platform capabilities

El principal objetivo de Single European Mobile Services Area (SEMOSA) es el de proporcionar una plataforma abierta de innovación y las herramientas necesarias para el desarrollo de aplicaciones para servicios móviles. La situación actual se enfrenta a un alto nivel de fragmentación en la industria de las aplicaciones móviles. Existen muchas plataformas tecnológicas creadas por suministradores competidores como por ejemplo los fabricantes de dispositivos móviles. Sin embargo, los servicios proporcionados por operadores móviles, instituciones financieras y empresas del mismo modo no poseen plataformas, prácticas o estándares comunes. En este ámbito el proyecto SEMOSA se centra en la estandarización de la implementación de aplicaciones y servicios seguros y en la necesidad de desplegarlas y gestionarlas basándose en fundamentos comunes y manteniendo los niveles de seguridad adecuados.

SEMOSA se posicionará para permitir el desarrollo y la interoperabilidad de ecosistemas enfocado a servicios de confianza, de una manera sencilla gracias a interfaces abiertas y la creación de herramientas adecuadas. SEMOSA será una plataforma abierta; un sistema de desarrollo de software abierto que publicará interfaces de servicios y APIs. Por un lado, este sistema software permitirá el desarrollo sencillo de aplicaciones móviles para usuarios y por otro, se presenta como un sistema para permitir la proporción de estas capacidades como plugins desde el punto de vista de los proveedores del servicio (p. ej. instituciones financieras). Pongamos el siguiente ejemplo: los Application Service Providers (ASPs) tienen la capacidad de desarrollar aplicaciones NFC sin poseer ningún conocimiento acerca de la tarjeta SIM, sus tecnologías y estándares. Esto permite conectarlos e interactuar con servicios confiables como pueden ser las aplicaciones de pago o de identificador de móvil. Una plataforma abierta y estandarizada permitirá a una tercera parte integrarse con la plataforma y añadir las características o funcionalidades que se precisen en cada caso. Esto permitirá alcanzar inimaginables cotas e innovaciones. En este largo camino, los ecosistemas estará formados por componentes software o módulos que podrán ser de tipo comercial, abierto o ambos.

SEMOSA proporcionará una amplia plataforma abierta para aplicaciones móviles que se basará en los siguientes factores:

1)            Accesibilidad y sostenibilidad de los resultados; plataformas software abiertas y gobierno frente a la gestión de proyectos, licencias OOS y colaboración con mejores prácticas han sido probadas en proyectos OSS (eclipse, apache…) de éxito comprobado.

 

2)            Colaboración internacional y participación de socios industriales clave; SEMOSA reunirá un consorcio internacional formado por los países y empresas europeas más destacados. Estos socios serán los encargados de construir la plataforma y de proporcionar demostradores para aplicaciones de carácter crítico como m-payments o m-transportation para probar estos servicios y su interoperabilidad. Los pilotos y demostraciones presentarán adaptaciones y configuraciones que necesitarán llevarse a cabo de forma que se produzca el despliegue de estas aplicaciones en escenarios del mundo real.

 

Este proyecto ha sido cofinanciado por el Ministerio de Industria, Energía y Turismo, dentro del Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica 2008-2011.