Message from the Organizers of the Workshop on Next Generation Service Platforms for Future Mobile Systems (SPMS 2007)

The enormous success of the Internet results to a large extent from the flexible and easy to use platform it provides to create innovative services and applications that quickly find acceptance and customers. In parallel to the Internet, mobile communications also has evolved to an integral component in our everyday life providing a growing variety of services. Industry is pushing new standards that allow high data rate multimedia applications as well as seamless communication across heterogeneous radio and network technologies. The success of the next generation mobile telecommunication systems will depend on the services and applications that can be provided. These future systems are expected to converge traditional mobile telecommunication systems and the Internet supported by software engineering methods. New paradigms will emerge. For example, the customer acceptance is considered to be widely increased by tailoring services and applications to actual user needs, their preferences and the context a user is in. Ubiquitous services receive increased user acceptance. A well engineered next generation service platform should provide all capabilities to allow innovative services to be created and deployed in short time addressing user needs. Open interfaces allow a chaining of expertise in service provisioning. Semantic technologies may help to structure knowledge about the user’s vicinity.