The CINCO Lab is comprises of a number of ecosystems,  in different level of maturity ranging from simple communicating software-based services to dynamically evolving, governed ecosystems. For each ecosystem, a common theme or service domain is essential, and we will nuture ecosystems in

• indoors navigation for the blind;
• healthcare services;
• mobile business services;
• increased environmental awareness; and
• things arising from student initiatives.

In these ecosystems, each project or laboratory task addresses a specific development or evolution aspect:

• Enterprise architecture modeling and analysis to help member organisations to improve their ecosystem participation;
• Service Oriented Software Engineering & Model Driven Engineering for producing software-based services into the ecosystems;
• Business processes (orchestration, choreographies, modeling of, automation of, verification of, declarative processes, evolving processes) for producing collaboration types into the ecosystems;
• Dynamic composition of services and management of such collaborations, especially in terms of interoperability, for utilising the multi-partner collaborations;
• Building new or improved versions of ecosystem infrastructure services such as eContracting, monitoring, breach management, trust and reputation management, ESBs, open bindings and binding factories); and
• Building new or improved version of service-oriented software engineering tools.

The tasks can be completed as individual work during a laboratory course giving a more in-depth and hands-on experience of the concepts discussed during the courses, as group work at the laboratory course, or as individual BSc/MSc/PhD thesis work. In each case, good quality results become a part of the suitable ecosystems of the CINCO Lab for others to use.

Each project or laboratory task is implemented on a selected technical platform or global infrastructure, such as Web Services, Pilarcos infrastructure services, Android environments. A number of tools or tool chains have been selected for ecosystem level service production.

The emphasis of CINCO Lab is on the type of services produced, their interoperability properties, and in their platform-independence -- alignment and connectivity to ecosystems matter. In contrast to Software Laboratory at this department, where the focus of learning is in the production process, in the CINCO Lab the focus is on the higher level platform abstraction (for example, communication and processing abstractions are aware of organisational boundaries and structure of communication and conversation between parties), and the service-based value nets that become safer and more sustainable.