Experts and computer scientists from Europe and Israel have begun to work on a project that seeks to resolve the problems of interoperation between electronic services. The ACSI ('Artifact-centric service interoperation') will examine the viability of interoperation hubs and dynamic artefacts as ways to improve the process whereby e-services are merged into one dynamic system.

The Artifact-centric service interoperation - ASCI project has been funded WITH 3.24 million Euro by the 'Information and Communication Technologies' (ICT) Theme of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and  will be undertaken by experts on business process management, artifact-centric business operations, verification, data integration and ontologies, process mining and services architectures.

Nowadays, the lack of interoperation between electronic services presents a considerable problem. Many e-businesses are confronted with the need to bring together multiple e-services in order to operate as a whole, to collaborate with one another and to achieve mutual targets. Government departments and many sectors in the EU, such as energy, health, water or transport, also have an increasing need to share knowledge, systems and competencies through a myriad of e-services. The open-source software that will ultimately be created will allow any organisation worldwide to use the technology.

The 'merging' process is usually complex, fraud with difficulties, time-consuming, costly, etc. Acording this ideas, eight partners from Belgium, Estonia, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and Israel will pursue a research programme over the next three years based on two priority axes. The first, interoperation hubs, will enable flexible and scalable support for service collaborations in an open network. The second, dynamic artefacts, will simplify the management of data and processes between different services and organisations.

To become operational by 2013, the team will pursue three research stages: the development of the new notion of an artefact-centric interoperation hub, the development of a prototype for creating and operating these hubs and demonstration and testing to validate the research results. The ACSI team has also set itself several productivity targets to reduce merging time and increase automation and efficiency.

Projects and initiatives such as ASCI, meet the general issues pointed out in fora like the fifth Ministerial Government Conference held in Malmö (Sweden) in 2009, where EU ministers committed to developing smarter online public services for citizens and businesses by 2015.