About Spice

• Provide an easy and simple way to create and roll out innovative services to reduce development time, costs and risks
• Provide a unified and seamless way to deliver services over heterogeneous execution platforms, network and terminals
• Enrich the service landscape, through an overlay structure supporting the users and offering a personalized user experience anytime, anyplace;
• Create a trusted and open platform that will simplify the use of services, devices through personalization and customization
• Enrich current service platform functionality with content management features and intelligent service-controlled context-information processing
• Open-up to new business models & value chains.
• Enable Pan-European service provisioning, and seamless roaming of applications and services across commercial and national borders
• Promote the uptake of innovative IT software technologies in a telecommunications grade service platform environment.

SPICE aims at overcoming major hurdles faced when creating and delivering mobile services. Examples of such hurdles are:

• Time to market for new services developments is too long
• Integration and deployment cost are too high due to the inherent complexity and heterogeneity of service execution environments
• Users own many different communication devices and are surrounded by many access technologies but they usually cannot handle the complexity of accessing their services via several of these devices.
• Service provisioning involves more and more parties - Telco, content/service providers, third party networks and service providers, and even end-users - increasing the complexity of the environment for service operation.
• Continuity of service from fixed to mobile access and seamless roaming of services across operators and network is far from being a reality
In this context, the main challenges in SPICE are:
• To provide end-users with communication means and tailored applications anywhere, anytime and on any device;
• To provide service providers and non-professional users with service enablers that facilitate and quicken application development.
• To allow operators to take up the role of Service Provider
• To build a user-transparent infrastructure that hides the complexity of services and applications crossing over different access domains and copes with the various access network technologies and offering a diversity of services.

WWI projects structure

Work package structure of SPICE

• WP1 (Requirements, Scenarios, Architecture and Business Models) is focusing on the overall SPICE architecture and framework. WP1 also integrates the R&D results from the other WPs into a consistent overall view on mobile communication and information services.
• WP2 (Middleware & Service Enablers) aims at developing a component-based middleware layer to ensure the inter-working of distributed service components, across various networking and enterprise domains integrating 3rd party service providers. Component developers will use this infrastructure definition to make the components useable by the service creation and execution environments.
• WP3 (Distributed Communication Sphere Management) aims at technically supporting the users by setting-up mechanisms and solutions that provide them with 'always on' and the 'always best-configured' communication environment. The objective is also to exploit as much as possible the diversity of devices (and respective capabilities) constituting the user's communication environment.
• WP4 (Intelligent Service Enablers) aims at providing intelligent service platform solutions for user profile and context information management and for pro-active service adaptation (anticipatory and attentive middleware functionality).
• WP5 (Service Creation and Life-Cycle management) will specify and prototype an advanced Service Creation and Execution environment which aims at providing the telco or service provider with the capability of quickly designing, developing, delivering and executing new mobile services to end-user and devices, based on service components and enablers available on the service platform and on user devices.
• WP6 (Service Access Control and Trust Management) is focusing on all aspects related to controlling access to the service platform for users and third party service providers. This includes providing a security framework to support user and service authentication, authorisation, non-repudiation in single- and multi-domain-environments and also methods for management and enforcement of service level agreements.
• WP7 (Content Management and Delivery): This WP is mainly concerned with the preparation and delivery of multimedia content, and with supporting information that facilitate the access to such content. This content can be formatted in several ways for delivery over various networks to several end devices.
• WP8 (Experiencing SPICE) aims at assembling and validating platform components so as to demonstrate the essential results of SPICE. Demonstrations scenarios will show the ability to work across heterogeneous networks, environments and terminals.

SPICE project organisation and interaction between WPs