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-The Arrowhead project aims to address the technical and applicative issues associated with cooperative automation based on Service Oriented Architectures. The problems of developing such kind of systems are mainly due to the lack of adequate development and service documentation methodologies, which would ease the burden of reusing services on different applications. The Arrowhead project proposes a technical framework to efficiently support the development of such systems, which includes several tools for documentation of services and to support the development of SOA-based installations. The work presented in this paper describes the approach which has been developed for the first generation pilots to support the documentation of their structural services. Each service, system and system-of-systems within the Arrowhead Framework must be documented and described in such way that it can be implemented, tested and deployed in an interoperable way. This paper presents the first steps of realizing the Arrowhead vision for interoperable services, systems and systems-of-systems.

Decision making for incompetent patients is a much-discussed topic in bioethics. According to one influential decision making standard, the substituted judgment standard, the decision that ought to be made for the incompetent patient is the decision the patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Although the merits of this standard have been extensively debated, some important issues have not been sufficiently explored. One fundamental problem is that the substituted judgment standard, as commonly formulated, is indeterminate in content and thus offers the surrogate little or no guidance. What the standard does not specify is just how competent one should imagine the patient to be, and what else one ought to envision about the patient's hypothetical outlook and the circumstances surrounding his or her decision making. The article discusses this problem of underdetermined decision conditions.

Non-therapeutic research on children raises ethical concerns. Such research is not only conducted on individuals who are incapable of providing informed consent. It also typically involves some degree of risk or discomfort, without prospects of medically benefiting the participating children. Therefore, these children seem to be instrumentalized. Some ethicists, however, have tried to sidestep this problem by arguing that the children may indirectly benefit from participating in such research, in ways not related to the medical intervention as such. It has been argued, for example, that non-therapeutic pediatric research does not instrumentalize the children enrolled since it has the prospects of furthering their moral development. We argue that this argument is far too undeveloped to be taken seriously.

Decision making for incompetent patients is a much-discussed topic in bioethics. According to one influential decision making standard, the substituted judgment standard, a surrogate decision maker ought to make the decision that the incompetent patient would have made, had he or she been competent. Empirical research has been conducted in order to find out whether surrogate decision makers are sufficiently good at doing their job, as this is defined by the substituted judgment standard. This research investigates to what extent surrogates are able to predict what the patient would have preferred in the relevant circumstances. In this paper we address a methodological shortcoming evident in a significant number of studies. The mistake consists in categorizing responses that only express uncertainty as predictions that the patient would be positive to treatment, on the grounds that the clinical default is to provide treatment unless it is refused. We argue that this practice is based on confusion and that it risks damaging the research on surrogate accuracy.