Projects

ACTIVE - Knowledge Powered Enterprise (ACTIVE)

Europe is in transition to a knowledge economy. Effective knowledge management is fundamental to successful economic activity, yet enterprises find it hard to transform much of their essential knowledge into transferable, easily accessible, and actionable knowledge assets. Such hidden knowledge is typically held by individual knowledge workers, being either tacit (unarticulated) or explicit but not widely available (e.g. emails, personal desktop files).

ACTIVE aims to increase the productivity of knowledge workers in a pro-active, contextual, yet easy and unobtrusive way. The aim is to convert tacit and unshared knowledge - the "hidden intelligence" of enterprises - into transferable, interoperable and actionable knowledge to support seamless collaboration and to enable problem solving. A key aspect will be support for informal procedural knowledge - the informal collaboration and problem-solving tasks that drive much knowledge work in the enterprise.

ACTIVE will integrate concepts, methods and tools from the fields of (i) Social Software and Web 2.0, (ii) Semantic Technologies, (iii) Context Mining, Context Modelling, and Context Sensitive Task Management, and (iv) Knowledge Process Mining, Knowledge Process Modelling and Pro-Active Knowledge Process Support into highly innovative application systems. The development will be accompanied by an analysis of key economic and organizational factors and incentive mechanisms, and strongly user-centric system development and evaluation.

The key result of ACTIVE will be a breakthrough which empowers enterprises to make knowledge technology effective for a much larger share of their essential knowledge.

ACTIVE will generate sustainable impact by deploying the tools and applications in three industry sectors: consulting, telecommunication and engineering ("ACTIVE technology"). The added value of ACTIVE technology will be evaluated in economic, organizational, and user studies, which conclude with rigorous field tests. A major focus of ACTIVE will be uptake by industry beyond the immediate consortium.

COllaboration and INteroperability for networked enterprises (COIN)

“By 2020 enterprise collaboration and interoperability services will become an invisible, pervasive and self-adaptive knowledge and business utility at disposal of the European networked enterprises from any industrial sector and domain in order to rapidly set-up, efficiently manage and effectively operate different forms of business collaborations, from the most traditional supply chains to the most advanced and dynamic business ecosystems.”

The mission of the COIN IP is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support the above 2020 vision. COIN business-pervasive open-source service platform will be able to expose, integrate, compose and mash-up in a secure and adaptive way existing and innovative to be developed Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration services, by applying intelligent maturity models, business rules and self-adaptive decision-support guidelines to guarantee the best combination of the needed services in dependence of the business context, as industrial sector and domain, size of the companies involved, openness and dynamics of collaboration.

This way, the Information Technology vision of Software as a Service (SaaS) will find its implementation in the field of interoperability among collaborative enterprises, supporting the various collaborative business forms, from supply chains to business ecosystems, and becoming for them like a utility, a commodity, the so-called Interoperability Service Utility (ISU).
The COIN project will finally develop an original business model based on the SaaS-U (Software as a Service-Utility) paradigm where the open-source COIN service platform will be able to integrate both free-of-charge and chargeable, open and proprietary services depending on the case and business policies.

European e-Freight capabilities for Co-modal transport (e-Freight)

The e-Freight project is aimed at supporting, from a transport perspective, the three pillars of European Policy namely:

• Strengthening of the internal market and competitiveness;
• Improving regulation to create a more dynamic business environment;
• Promoting sustainable development.

Specifically e-Freight will contribute to the goals of the Freight transport Logistics Action Plan (Oct 2007), and ITS Action Plan (Oct 2008) pertaining to the development of:

1. A standard framework for freight information exchange covering all transport modes and all stakeholders.
2. A European Single Transport Document for carriage of goods with all the necessary legislative support,
   irrespective of mode.
3. A Single Window (single access point) for administrative procedures in all modes.
4. Simple, harmonised border crossings procedures for all modes of transport for all EU member states.
5. Simple procedures and the necessary infrastructure for establishing secure and efficient transport corridors between Europe, USA, and Asia.

EnvIronmental Services Infrastructure with Ontologies (ENVISION)

The ENVISION project provides an ENVIronmental Services Infrastructure with Ontologies that aims to support non ICT-skilled users in the process of semantic discovery and adaptive chaining and composition of environmental services. Innovations in ENVISION are: on-the-Web enabling and packaging of technologies for their use by non ICT-skilled users, support for migrating environmental models to be provided as models as a service (Maas), and the use of data streaming information for harvesting information for dynamic building of ontologies and adapting service execution.

The ENVISION Environmental Decision Portal supports the creation of web-based applications enabled for dynamic discovery and visual service chaining. The ENVISION Ontology Infrastructure provides support for visual semantic annotation tools and multilingual ontology management. The ENVISION Execution Infrastructure comprises a semantic discovery catalogue and a semantic service mediator based on a generic semantic framework and adaptive service chaining with data-driven adaptability.

Scenario requirements and pilots from the ENVISION user partners focus on landslide hazard assessment and environmental pollution (oil spills) decision support systems. The benefit of ENVISION for the wider community will be better accessibility to modelling tools using the Web and it will provide greater flexibility through improved connections to distributed sources of information.

Incentives for Semantics (INSEMTIVES)

A critical mass of semantically annotated Web pages or multimedia repositories, as well as business-relevant, widely-accepted ontologies would provide a feasible basis for the development of real-world semantic applications, for the adoption of this technology at industrial level, and, why not, for the realization of the Semantic Web vision.

It is therefore understandable that the question of how to create semantic content effectively and efficiently has been investigated in several areas related to semantic technologies, ranging from ontology engineering, ontology learning and ontology population, to the semantic annotation of text, media and Web services resources. The result is a maturing inventory of techniques and tools which primarily aim at a complete (or at least partial) automation of the semantic content generation and management tasks, as a means to lower costs and improve productivity. Whilst the quality of such (fully) automated approaches has constantly improved, it is still far from outweighing the manual effort savings achieved, especially when it comes to the creation of meta-data for non-textual sources or the development of a widely accepted ontology, tasks which are human-driven through their very nature.

The declared aim of this project is to bridge the gap between human and computational intelligence in current semantic content authoring R&D landscape and to produce methodologies, methods and tools optimally exploiting and combining the two to enable the massive creation and feasible management of semantic contents in an economically based manner, and consequently, to provide the missing building block towards the world wide uptake of semantic technologies. Besides automated ways of semantic content creation, the participation of users who actively contribute to the semantic annotation is the main purpose of the proposed R&D project. For the attraction and motivation of users to engage and cooperate in this process, concepts of community have proven to be a critical success factor.

Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC)

The aim of the EU FP 7 Large-Scale Integrating Project LarKC is to develop the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced "lark"), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web. This will be achieved by:

• Enriching the current logic-based Semantic Web reasoning methods with methods from information retrieval, machine learning, information theory, databases, and probabilistic reasoning.
• Employing cognitively inspired approaches and techniques such as spreading activation, focus of attention, reinforcement, habituation, relevance reasoning, and bounded rationality.
• Building a distributed reasoning platform and realizing it both on a high-performance computing cluster and via "computing at home".

The consortium is an interdisciplinary team of engineers and researchers in Computing Science, Web Science and Cognitive Science, well qualified to realize this ambitious vision. The Large Knowledge Collider will be an open architecture. Researchers and practitioners from outside the consortium will be encouraged to develop and plug in their own components to drive parts of the system. This will make the Large Knowledge Collider a generic platform, and not just a single reasoning engine. The success of the Large Knowledge Collider will be demonstrated in three end-user case studies. The first one is from the telecommunication sector. It aims at real-time aggregation and analysis of location data obtained from mobile phones carried by the population of a city, in order to regulate city infrastructure functions such as public transport and to provide context-sensitive navigation information. The other two case studies are in the life-sciences domain, related respectively to drug discovery and carcinogenesis research. Both will demonstrate that the capabilities of the Large Knowledge Collider go well beyond what is possible with current Semantic Web infrastructure.

A P2P platform supporting virtual communities to assist independent living of senior citizens (PeerAssist)

The main objectives of the PeerAssist project are the conceptualisation, design, implementation and demonstration of a flexible Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platform, which will allow elderly people (not necessarily familiar with ICT technologies) to build virtual communities dynamically based on interests and needs they share. The PeerAssist platform will facilitate establishing on demand ad-hoc communities with friends, family, neighbours, caregivers, facilitators, care providers, etc., based on shared interests and communication needs. The community building and the P2P interaction will be achieved using information extracted from peer roles, profiles and user modelling, context that describes the overall user environment, and the specific request initiated, or service provided, by a peer, all of which are represented semantically in a machine understandable form. An end-user request (query) is first represented semantically and then routed through the network in order to find semantically matching peers. PeerAssist can form the basis for developing a wide number of applications including (but not limited to): (i) peer-driven organization of social activities (such as going out, going to the movies, exchanging books, organizing a social gathering, etc.); (ii) soliciting peer help with housekeeping and other daily activities; (iii) allowing support organizations to “push” relevant content to interested elderly users; (iii) allowing caregivers, facilitators and family members to receive alerts if certain expected home activities of the elderly people are interrupted; (iv) responding to emergency situations that may ask for immediate action.

PlanetData - A planet of data (PlanetData)

The main aim of PlanetData is to establish an interdisciplinary, sustainable European community of researchers, helping organizations to expose their data on the Web in a useful way.

PlanetData will push forward the state-of-the-art in large-scale data management and its application to the creation of useful, open data sets. This is motivated by

1. the increasing reliance of business on large public data;
2. the uptake of open data principles in many vertical sectors, most notably eGovernment, for public or social good, to increase the efficiency of end-user services and enable novel business models; and
3. the need of research communities to make sense out of petabytes of scientific data, to describe and expose this data in ways that encourage and enable collaboration. Research questions relevant to large-scale data management are inherently interdisciplinary; their durable resolution requires the building of bridges between the different research communities that currently exist in isolation from each other.

REflecting kNowledge DivERsity (RENDER)

The RENDER project addresses the challenges arising when analyzing the dynamics of online information. An amazing diversity of opinions, viewpoints, mind sets and backgrounds can be extracted from Web content. Large scale data management calls upon fundamental challenges with respect to the purposeful access, processing and management of the Web’s dynamic information avalanche, in particular when leveraging the diversity that inherently unfolding through world wide scale collaboration.

RENDER will engage with these challenges by developing methods, techniques, software and data sets that will leverage diversity as a crucial source of innovation and creativity, whilst providing enhanced support for feasibly managing data at very large scale, and for designing novel algorithms that reflect diversity in the ways information is selected, ranked, aggregated, presented and used in popular communication and collaboration platforms such as MediaWiki, Twitter, WordPress and Google Wave.

RENDER will help to realize a world where information is acquired and shared in a fundamentally different manner than the consensual approach promoted by movements such as Web 2.0, and where communication and collaboration across the borders of social, cultural or professional communities are truly enabled via advanced Web technology, supporting one of the credos of European society: “United in diversity”.

The project will run for 36 months starting in October 2010.

Software Services and Systems Network (S-Cube)

S-Cube, the Software Services and Systems Network, will establish an integrated, multidisciplinary, vibrant research community which will enable Europe to lead the software-services revolution, thereby helping shape the software-service based Internet which is the backbone of our future interactive society.

An integration of research expertise and an intense collaboration of researchers in the field of software services and systems are needed to address the following key problems:

• Research fragmentation: Current research activities are fragmented and each research community (e.g., grid computing or software engineering) concentrates mostly on its own specific techniques, mechanisms and methodologies. As a result the proposed solutions are not aligned with or influenced by activities in related research fields.
• Future Challenges: One challenge, as an example, is to build service-based systems in such a way that they can self-adapt while guaranteeing the expected level of service quality. Such an adaptation can be required due to changes in a system’s environment or in response to predicted and unpredicted problems.

Semantic Evaluation At Large Scale (SEALS)

Semantic technologies are at the heart of the future Web providing ways to express knowledge and data so that it can be properly exploited. These technologies will empower a new class of Information and Communication Technologies much more scalable, interoperable, and with a higher degree of process automation support that will fulfill the needs of an emergence market that will exceed $10 billion by 2010. This is a very active research area, but still suffers from a lack of standard benchmarks and infrastructures for assessing research outcomes. SEALS addresses two key challenges: the creation of a lasting reference infrastructure for semantic technology evaluation and the continuous benchmarking of semantic technologies at a large scale via public worldwide evaluation campaigns.

Service Detective (Service Detective)

The goal of Service-Detective is thus to overcome shortcomings of current Web Service search engines by:

• Employing automated methods to gather Web Services and related resources.
• Leveraging automatic means to create semantic service descriptions from information available on the Web.
• Describing the aggregated information in semantic models and allowing reasoning over it.
• Building meaningful clusters of the collected services and of search results.
The Service-Detective project will deliver a search engine that enables users to find up-to- date information on available Web Services. It will employ automated crawling, information retrieval methods and analysis techniques and shall be able to scale with the increasing number of services, as this approach does not rely on a central editorial team that would necessarily become a bottleneck once the number of deployed services reaches Web scale. Consequently, the approaches developed by Service-Detective can adapt quickly to changes in terms of the available services. The search engine will leverage available information exposed by current technologies and extend this information with semantic annotations to allow for more accurate retrieval. It will use the service information to enable efficient clustering and matchmaking of services, in view of the goal to provide an efficient discovery and clustered search possibility for Web Services.

Salzburg NewMediaLab – The Next Generation (SNML-TNG)

Salzburg NewMediaLab – The Next Generation (SNML-TNG) is the competence centre in Austria that takes the knowledge and media industry into the Future Internet, helping its partners to address the new challenges arising with the paradigmatic shift that is currently affecting the industry. SNML-TNG conducts research on the socio-economic and the technological level in the fields of Social Computing, Social Media & Enterprise 2.0, Semantic Web & Linked Data, and Multimedia Annotations. A common trait of all fields is “Linked Media”, which is therefore at the heart of the SNML-TNG research programme. Linked Media is the convergence of linked people, linked content, and linked data.

• on the socio-economic level, SNML-TNG will explore the use of Linked Media in the Enterprise 2.0, the issue of Trust and Reputation, as well as Future Social Media Interfaces. Socio-economic research will be carried out in the form of studies and visionary scenario proposals that are specifically tailored towards our company partners.
• on the technological-conceptual level, SNML-TNG will investigate open technological research questions in the areas of Social Media, Linked Data, Recommendation Systems, and Multimedia Annotations and develop appropriate models and methodologies.
• on the technological development level, SNML-TNG will implement an Open Source framework (the “Linked Media Framework”) verifying the feasibility of its ideas in a practical system that can be further developed into a functioning platform by the partners.

SNML-TNG brings together leading Austrian research institutes with a proven excellence in the areas of Social Media, Semantic Technologies and Multimedia (Salzburg Research, STI Innsbruck, FH Salzburg) and major members of the Austrian knowledge and media industry (ORF, Red Bull Media House, basis wien), as well as a number of innovative technology companies (punkt. netServices, mediamid, Technodat).

SOA4All: A Web of billions of Services (SOA4All)

The emerging generation starts by abstracting from software and sees all resources as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). In a world of services, it is the service that counts for a customer and not the software or hardware components which implement the service. Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. A service Web will have billions of services. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing by abstracting from the underlying hardware and software layers, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges that SOA does not address today. SOA4All will help to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology.

The outcome of the project will be a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary and revolutionary technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform:

• Web principles and technology as the underlying infrastructure for the integration of services at a world wide scale.
• Web 2.0 as a means to structure human-machine cooperation in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
• Semantic Web technology as a means to abstract from syntax to semantics as
  required for meaningful service discovery.
• Context management as a way to process in a machine understandable way user needs that facilitates the customization of existing services for the needs of users.

SOA4All will significantly impact the competitiveness of the European Software and IT Services industry and more widely to address the Lisbon goals. For that purpose SOA4All will use the support of the NESSI constituency and will contribute significantly to the NESSI Open Framework, which is one of the main challenges of the European Platform on Software and Services. It has a consortium of 16 partners and led by Atos Origin.

Semantics and Ontologies for Feedback-driven Adapting Recommender Systems (SOFAR)

Consumers increasingly buy products through the Internet, but they lack assistance for searching the “right” product. Recommender systems address this problem by asking targeted questions. The success (or failure) of such a recommendation process is defined in terms of conversion rate or click-out rate. It is very difficult to predict improvements for given changes of the recommendation process, however, and manual changes are usually very expensive.

Therefore, SOFAR ("Semantics and Ontologies for Feedback-driven Adapting Recommender Systems") proposes automated adaptations of recommendation processes making use of semantic technology. The approach makes Internet content accessible for searching products.

Security UPgrade for PORTs (SUPPORT)

SUPPORT aims to raise the current level of port security by integrating legacy port systems with new surveillance and information management systems. SUPPORT will provide the necessary and sufficient security level to satisfy evolving international regulations and standards while efficiently supporting the complexity of the real port environment. As part of this, SUPPORT will also facilitate efficient and, where required, real-time exchange of security related information within the supply chain and between ports and authorities.

SUPPORT partners include a number of ports that have been selected to represent typical, but different operations. Starting from the perspective of the partner port operations, the project will use a cost-benefit method to identify the main security gaps and will describe security measures to maintain or augment the efficient and secure operation of these ports. The approach will combine creative and analytical techniques to identify as many relevant threats as possible.

After making an inventory of security gaps these will be developed into generic port security models. The models will be used to suggest security upgrade solutions, taking into account the cost-benefit factors of the available technology. Peer-to-peer communication and decision support tools incorporating semantic technologies will be developed, using as far as possible standard open architecture software, accessible to all the port security stakeholders. The results will be demonstrated at the ports of Gothenburg and Piraeus. SUPPORT will include policy and standardisation proposals and training for participating port personnel as well as dissemination activities for other ports and stakeholders. One aim of SUPPORT is to provide general methods and technology supported by training services that can be used by any European port to efficiently enhance its security level.

Auf dem Weg zu semantischen wissenschaflichen Workflows: WSMO4LS (WSMO4LS)

Scientific Workflows are very important to support life-science researcher in the discovery of cures for many diseases. Life-science researchers need easy to use and as much as possible automated software frameworks, so as to require for them a minimum knowledge of software technologies to accomplish their daily research task without extra learning efforts and reducing their manual efforts. Research in scientific workflows produced many results in this area, but still a huge manual effort is required to scientists to integrate different available data and compose different available services. Semantic Web is currently one of the most interesting research areas with focus on automation of interoperability composition, and discovery of services that can bring a huge contribute to the research in scientific workflow. The objective of the collaboration among the University of Innsbruck and the University of Malaga, is to bring together their respective expertises in Semantic Web technologies and scientific workflows to produce a prototype of a innovative Semantic based framework for scientific workflows.