This SSOKU09 conference, jointly organised by the European Union (EU) funded projects 3S and CHALLENGERS, will set the foundation for an annual European Summit on Software Services and Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities technologies.

More than 200 experts, including high level researchers, top industrial and political representatives from the European Commission and from national authorities, will come together for two days, to discuss the future of Grids & Software and Service oriented Architectures.

The latest results of the ECSS White Paper on Software and Service Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering and of the Challengers' Research Agenda and Roadmap on Grids will be presented and will serve as the basis for a fruitful discussion and further evaluation.

The discussions and the outcome of this event is of primary significance for the endeavour of CHALLENGERS and 3S to maximize their influence towards the support of policy making as well as to pave the way for future synergies and collaboration in the ICT domain.

European SMEs participation is particularly encouraged and attendance from European and International projects and initiatives, universities, media, commercial, research or governmental organisations are very welcome.

The event features an interesting mix of plenary and parallel sessions, additionally to a technological exhibition space and promotional area, focusing around non-technical issues as well as business, research and standards tracks. The opening plenary will feature speeches from the European Commission and from the 3S and Challengers consortia. Additionally, the SSAI unit of the European Commission will give a general presentation of the 5th ICT Call, the 2009 work-programme.

The conference will include invited presentations from experts from academia, industry, and government as well as presentations from the call for participation. Topics will include but are not limited to:

• Technical Aspects: Metadata for service description, Self-* behaviour of future SOAs, Service life cycle from management to governance, Intelligent Networking and connectivity, Formal Methods, Programming models & languages for SOAs, Semantic Interoperability, Autonomic Computing, Trust Security and Privacy, FLOSS, etc ...
• Business Aspects: New business opportunities within the 'cloud', Provision of virtualised services and resources, Simplification of software use and of management of complex or large-scale platforms, Business benefits of GRIDs/SOA to support existing or novel applications' needs.
• Standards: When where and how to standardise, Standards towards interoperability of virtualised resources, Standards for transition from traditional software environments to SOAs and SOKU environments
• Non-Technical Challenges: Novel policies for test beds on massive testing of innovative services by users communities, Green World and ICT, Facing the ICT of tomorrow: Behavioural issues of user's communities and organisations, Socio-Cultural Factors Influencing Software Service Business Models, SMEs needs in a competitive Europe, etc ...

Registration and Calls are now open. Participation is free of charge but subject to previous on-line registration at http://www.eu-ecss.eu/forms/SSOKU09-registration/

To learn more on the event, you can visit the SSOKU09 website at www.eu-ecss.eu/conference