This paper was presented at the 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) within the Engineering Semantic Agent Systems (ESAS 2008) workshop. The conference was held in Turku (Finland) from the 28 July 2008 to the 1 August 2008.

Abstract: Lifecycle support of a process from conception, implementation and evaluation can be enabled in a distributed cross organisational environment using Service Orientated Architectures (SOA). In the automation domain the development of such lifecycles are both vital for the competitiveness of European manufacturing and challenging due to the environments they exist in. This paper explores the main innovations needed to achieve SOA based application lifecycle management in the automation sector initially looking at a successful lifecycle implementation in the eScience community. This highlights the need for clearly defined standards architecture and ontology building methodologies for emerging SOA communities to achieve lifecycle management around clearly defined and managed metadata.