The OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative - now an obsolete name) is an open standards organization founded in March 1999. The Alliance and its members have specified a Java-based service platform that can be remotely managed. The core part of the specifications is a framework that defines an application life cycle management model, a service registry, an Execution environment and Modules. Based on this framework, a large number of OSGi Layers, APIs, and Services have been defined.
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osgi
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osgi