Archive

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.

Adaptive Services Grid (ASG)

The goal of Adaptive Services Grid (ASG) is to develop a proof-of-concept prototype of an open development platform for adaptive services discovery, creation, composition, and enactment. ASG provides the integration of its sub-projects in the context of an open platform, including tool development by small and medium sized enterprises. Based on semantic specifications of requested services by service customers, ASG discovers appropriate services, composes complex processes and - if required - generates software to create new application services on demand. Subsequently, application services will be provided through the underlying computational grid infrastructure based on adaptive process enactment technology. In the proposed project, methods and concepts from software architectures, software development methodologies, Web services composition and workflow process planning and coordination will be complemented by recent results in domain engineering, software generation and Semantic web and agent negotiation research. To achieve its goal, ASG addresses scientific and technological issues making use of the knowledge and expertise of major European research institutions with significant contributions from the software, telecommunications, and telematics industry.

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.

Cadence

To keep pace with market demand for more performance and functionality in today’s mobile phones, digital cameras, computers, automotive systems and other electronics products, manufacturers pack billions of transistors onto a single chip. This massive integration parallels the shift to ever-smaller process geometries, where the chip’s transistors and other physical features can be smaller than the wavelength of light used to print them. Designing and manufacturing semiconductor devices with such phenomenal scale, complexity and technological challenges would not be possible without electronic design automation (EDA). It is essential for everything from verifying that the myriad transistors do what the designer intended to dealing with physical effects on electrons traveling miles of wires with widths sometimes measuring less than 100 nanometers. Cadence Design Systems is the world's leading EDA company. Cadence customers use our software, hardware, and services to overcome a range of technical and economic hurdles. DERI Innsbruck's Business Development provided consultancy service to Cadence in 2007.

Corporate Ontology Grid (COG)

The objectives of COG are: Demonstrate the Applicability of Grid Technologies to Industry Realize the Concept of an Information Grid Incorporating Real Corporate Data Give Semantics to Corporate Data Formats, including Legacy, Relational, and XML, through a Detailed Mapping to a Central Ontology Demonstrate the Technological Innovation of Automatically Translating Data Between Data Formats on the Grid by Way of a Semantic Mapping to a Central Ontology Publish a Reusable Ontology with Concepts from Discrete Manufacturing, and Specifically Automotive Capture Best Practices in Achieving these Objectives and Document the Methodology Disseminate the Methodology and the Results to Europe's Corporations Re-use of Methodology in Industry

Data, Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services (DIP)

The major mission of DIP is to further develop semantic web and web services and especially, to enable their combination. DIP takes the vision of Semantic Web Services and will work on transforming it into a mature and scalable technology. We will define and implement additional layers of functionality on top of the current web service stack and we implement the mechanization of eWork and eCommerce relationships based on Semantic Web technology.

Events: dip.semanticweb.org/events.html

Past events: dip.semanticweb.org/PastEvents.html

• Watch the DIP promotional video

Domain Specific Search Engine (DSSE)

The market for Internet search engines is currently dominated by several big companies, that, with immense effort (Google uses 16000 Linux Servers), try to index all pages on the Internet. But the number of pages available on the Internet is growing faster that they can be indexed. An alternative could be domain specific (vertical) search engines that are currently under discussion. These domain specific search engines could apply algorithms to automatically recognize the topic and content of a specific page. The aim of the project is to develop existing algorithms in a marketable product. New elements to be included in the project: Optimisation of algorithms for automatic topic recognition, based on linguistic analysis Integration of new business models for defined positioning (Paid Positioning) and defined integration (Paid Inclusion) to offer new models to the customers

EASAIER

Many digital sound archives suffer from tremendous problems concerning access. Sound materials are often held separately from other materials and media, they cannot easily be listened to or browsed, and there is no way to search the content. Existing systems which attempt to deal with these issues are often library or content specific, of limited functionality, or difficult to use. Extending over two and a half years, the EASAIER project will enable enhanced access to sound archives by providing multiple methods of retrieval, integration with other media archives, content enrichment and enhanced access tools. It offers methods of searching content based on audio features, musical features, or speech content. EASAIER also supports cross-media retrieval, enabling access to other media besides just audio.

EAST WEB - Asia Link

The goal of this project is to build an integrated leading Euro-Asian high education and research community in the field of the Semantic Web, the next generation of the Web. Direct target groups are graduate students, faculty staff and enterprises management personnel. Indirect target groups are European and Asian students, researchers and enterprises personnel at large. We plan to operate on the following three main actions: Human resources development: joint teaching and supervision of master and doctorate students; integration and collaboration among senior and young faculty; training the next generation of IT educators as well as of IT enterprises management. Distance Learning and Knowledge Management platform: to support current and future activities also after the end of the project Networking: we will foster the interaction among universities and companies in Europe and Asia in the field of Semantic Web. The European partners (Italy, Austria, Ireland, Poland) are leading institutes in the Semantic Web. The Asian partners (India, Thailand, China, and the associate partner Hong Kong) are among the best performance institutions in Asia .The duration of the project is 36 months.

enhanced Information Retrieval and Filtering for Analytical Systems (enIRaF)

Contemporary information retrieval and filtering (IRaF) systems lack the appropriate representation of user information needs and information itself. There are heterogeneous sources of information, and information usually is ambiguous. This project aims on the improvement of the IRaF system in order to better satisfy user needs by providing training in the following areas: formal models of ontologies, software and tools for ontologies, Semantic Web and Web Services, human language technology, decision making. Scientific quality of the training is assured by a co-operation with leading research centres from Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, and UK.

Esperonto

Esperonto's objective is to bridge the gap between the actual World Wide Web and the Semantic Web by providing a service to upgrade existing content to semantic Web content.

Ontologies play a key role in this effort, aiming at unifying, bridging and integrating multiple heterogeneous, international and multilingual digital content. Once having Semantic Web content, the project aims at exploiting the content through innovative graphical navigation, and prototyping distributed added value services.

etPlanner

Even today more than 40% of information that tourists retrieve is provided through internet and also more than 30% of all bookings are done this way. Tourism-related businesses need fast, wide-reaching announcement facilities to advertise their products. A web site is too "passive" for this purpose, so that we will use a push system to support active advertisement with booking functionalities et al. etPlanner is a mobile system for planning customized tourism experience. Using mobile devices (e.g. PDA, mobile phones) consumers get their visit planned in an intelligent way and will be supported throughout their whole journey. Tourists may react on special offers as well as on relating events such as departing delays or weather conditions.

Fred - agent platform for Semantic Web

The primary objective is to analyze the agent platform "Fred" and to position it within the existing State of the Art. All with respect to the potential within the area of semantic web and semantic web services.

Freds are agents that complete their tasks by communicating and interacting with each other within a central Fred Location. A single Fred Location may host several million Freds performing a variety of different tasks, interacting with each other. A common language ensures that Freds understand each other perfectly and can exchange information based on ontologies.

Agent Technologies and especially the Fred platform seems to have the potential to bring semantic web technologies to its full potential. Within this project we will identify further steps realizing this goal.

GoldenBullet Intelligent Classifier (GB-IC)

GoldenBullet is a semi-automatic product classification system.

Product classification for warehouse catalogues is a labour-intensive, complicated, time-consuming and error-prone process that requires tremendous efforts. In frequent repeated cycles, millions of millions of products have to be classified with regard to multiple existing standards (e.g. UNSPSC, GPC, e-Class) Furthermore, each of these standards may contain several thousands of target classes or customer specific taxonomies.

In the project GoldenBullet we aim to realize an innovative semi-automatic workflow to be delivered as service with a 95% classification accuracy via an integrated web application. This workflow seamlessly combines a fully automated product classifier with accurate manual classification and a background learning process. Further industrial cooperation will be fostered by applying industry scenarios to the workflow.

Grisino

The aim of GRISINO is to combine three leading edge technology strands which complement each other, for the definition of intelligent and dynamic business processes:

• Semantic Web Services as the future standard for the declaration of web-based semantic processes.
• Knowledge content objects as the unit of value which can be manipulated by semantic web services.
• Grid Computing as a pervasive service distribution infrastructure for a future, ambient intelligence space.
• The technology strands will be combined by jointly developing a test bed for experimentation with complex processes and complex objects (e.g. semantically annotated multimedia business objects).

h-TechSight

The objective of the h-TechSight IST project (Coordinated by The University of Surrey in England), is to exploit recent advances in knowledge-based and other systems to harness the potential of the web and turn it into an effective resource to enable businesses to monitor and boost their competitive performance by responding quickly to changes, threats and opportunities, whether local, national or global.

The idea is to create a "Virtual One-Stop-Shop", which each business can tailor to its own requirements and priorities.

InfraWebs

Intelligent Framework for Generating Open (Adaptable) Development Platforms for Web-Service Enabled Applications using Semantic Web Technologies and Multi-Agent Systems.

The main objective of Infrawebs is ti develop of a set of tools which will help creating, maintaining and executing Semantic Web Services (SWSs). These SWSs will be based on the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) and interoperable with existing standards such as SQARQL, RDF, WSDL and XML Schema.

Each set of tools is deployed within an Infrawebs Integrated Framework (IIF) which is also considered as an Infrawebs Unit. The IIF defines two distinctive (but linked) parts: a Design Time Phase and a Runtime Phase. The Design Time Phase consists of the tools involved during the design of SWSs, whereas the Runtime Phase consists of those tools involved during the execution of SWSs. Some of the tools may of course be involved in both phases. This approach ensures that users of the system (whether developers or normal end-users) deal with the minimum but complete set of tools required. Furthermore, it also provides an environment which is focused on the specific needs of the users.

ITS Netz

The Internet today offers an unmanageable large quantity of information. In order to find information relevant to the user, different search engines exist. Such a search software is DEUS3, a tool for domain-specific search. Although very useful, weaknesses and problems are hidden within DEUS3, which limit the costumer-friendliness and the adaptability of the software to real market conditions. In the course of the project the integratability of data base concepts into the search technology DEUS3 was examined - and accomplished. Now, DEUS3 makes it possible for customers from Austria and the EU member states to develop their own purposeful and meaningful knowledge map on the Internet and maintain these easily on a regularly basis.

Knowledge Web

In a nutshell, it is the mission of Knowledge Web to strengthen the European industry and service providers in one of the most important areas of current computer technology: Semantic web enabled e-work and e-commerce. We will concentrate our efforts around the outreach of this technology to industry. Naturally, this includes education and research efforts to ensure the durability of impact and support of industry. Therefore, the main Objectives of Knowledge Web are: Outreach to Industry, Outreach to Education, Coordination of Research

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.

LBSCult

NIWA and Wandermann designed a project called LBSCult that has initiated the construction of a network of competency for the development of an electronic culture guide for Vienna. Based on data models of Vienna's Culture Goods Cadaster and the picture archive of the Austrian National Libraray the concept of an open platform (LBSCult Service) has been created which connects multiple culture data bases, further content data bases, and GIS-systems and improves user inquiries with the help of Semantic Web technologies. It should enable the reception of touristic, cultural and historic information that is contextually related to the user's local position and personal interests, with mobile devices like PDA or smartphone.

MUSING

MUSING aims at developing a new generation of Business Intelligence (BI) tools and modules founded on semantic-based knowledge and content systems. MUSING will integrate Semantic Web and Human Language technologies and combine declarative rule-based methods and statistical approaches for enhancing the technological foundations of knowledge acquisition and reasoning in BI applications. The breakthrough impact of MUSING on semantic-based BI will be measured in three strategic, vertical domains: Finance, through development and validation of next generation (Basel II and beyond) semantic-based BI solutions, with particular reference to Credit Risk Management; Internationalisation, through development and validation of next generation semantic-based internationalisation platforms; Operational Risk Management, through development and validation of semantic-driven knowledge systems for measurement and mitigation tools, with particular reference to IT operational risks faced by IT-intensive organisations.

Next Generation Communication Services - Mobile / Fixed Line Integration Applikations (MOFA)

The increasing convergence of services of telecommunication providers with services of the Internet area induces eTel to start a research project evaluating the possibilities of a fusion of classical enterprise communication with mobile terminals. In the context of the project DERI’s task was, among other things, the development of a software solution based on Office-PBX Swyx, the development of the software architecture and specification of the APIs as well as the setup of a pilot environment (SIP capable terminal, Office PBX Swyx).

Ontology-based Online Tourism Offer Integration (OnTourism)

Today’s information management concepts and solutions for the complex tasks of tourism intermediaries – such as regional agencies, national travel organisations (NTOs), supra-national aggregators, and commercial retailers – are still low-level from a semantic point of view. Hence, information creation, maintenance and delivery being the primary business process of tourism intermediaries faces heterogeneities in various dimensions, requires manual coordination tasks, and suffers from missing consensus on agreed concepts and technologies. OnTourism is aimed at (1) applying, concretizing and evaluating Semantic Web technologies such as ontologies, semantic annotation of content, and semantic search to this information-rich and economically quite important domain, (2) identifying, developing and integrating reference ontologies for the tourism industry, and (3) showing the proof-of-concept in a real-world scenario of the Austrian tourism industry. Based on a semantic content management approach as well as mediator and data extraction technologies developed in previous research projects such as Harmonise and Harmo-TEN (www.harmo-ten.org), or utilising specialised data wrapping technologies such as liXto ®, OnTourism seeks to explore and expand the potential of advanced semantic technologies in a research domain of strong national interest, strength, and tradition.

OntoWeb

Currently computers are changing from single isolated devices into entry points into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. Support in data, information, and knowledge exchange is becoming the key issue in current computer technology. Ontologies will play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. They will enable the semantic web which provides on-line access to large volumes of information and knowledge based on machine-processable semantics of data. In consequence, there is a large interest in these topics from various sites.

Different research communities develop their subject into this direction; many commercial agents encounter the economical potential of the topic and many funding agencies are willing to provide significant support for its development. Still the different communities are scattered and have not yet found enough interactions to fully employ the potential of this new technology. It is the delighted goal of the OntoWeb network to bypass communication bottlenecks between these various and heterogeneous interest groups.

Open Ontology Environment for Semantic Web-based E-Commerce (MyOntology)

One core task in using the Web for E-Commerce applications is the search for suitable suppliers. Unfortunately, using traditional search engines like Google for discovering suitable offerings is unsatisfying. One paramount problem for E-Commerce solutions based on Semantic Web technology is the lack of high-quality ontologies for products and services, in particular such that are up-to-date. In the myOntology project, we use the infrastructure and culture of Wikis as an ontology workbench that fosters true collaborative, community-driven ontology creation and maintenance in the products and services domain, and establish a standardized framework for ontology-based products and services description for E-Commerce applications.

Our Research Institute @ LFUI Sustainability and Business Development

DERI is the leading European institution in the area of Semantic Web and Semantic Web services research. With support by the TransIT foundation, our institute is now starting to disseminiate fundamental research results into the business area. By setting up a business development group, results yielded by research of our institute will be aligned with market needs. The final goal is to set up a prospering community of start-ups in the Semantic Web field in Innsbruck and the Tyrol region. Also, thanks to TransIT support, our institute is able to increase its management staffing so that researchers can, despite our institute's organizational growths, continue to focus on excellence in research. A third component of this project is a permanent PhDs student exchange with Stanford, MIT, and the National University of Ireland in Galway.

RW2

Web Services are widely seen as the most promising technology to enable interoperability among heterogeneous applications. However, current technologies only describe syntactical aspects of Web Services, providing a very limited automation support for the integration task. Semantic Web technologies are being applied to Web Services with the aim of offering a higher support for the automation of a number of tasks, significantly improving the quality of the integration tasks while drastically reducing its cost. The RW² project follows the direction of research that describes Web Services using semantic annotations.

Salero

SALERO's goal is to define and develop "intelligent content" objects with context-aware behaviours for self-adaptive use and delivery across different platforms, building on and extending research in media technologies, web semantics, and context based image retrieval, to reverse the trend toward ever-increasing cost of creating media. SALERO aims to advance the state of the art in digital media to the point where it becomes possible to create audiovisual content for cross-platform delivery using intelligent content tools, with greater quality at lower cost, to provide audiences with more engaging entertainment and information at home or on the move.

The RTD addresses:

•  Understanding the relations between media types, genres, workflows and styles;
•  Metadata, Media Semantics and Ontologies for semantically aware content objects;
• Practical methods of context-based information retrieval of characters, sounds, images, movements or behaviours;
• Procedures for manipulating the appearance, sound, movement and behaviour of semantically aware characters and objects;
• Improved methods and tools for script translation and speech synthesis;
• Software toolkits, systems, plug-ins and interfaces for control of appearances, sounds, semantic behaviour and properties of intelligent content objects;
• SALERO will guide, validate and evaluate the R&D through experimental productions across a range of important media genre, based on scenarios defined by artists and creative media professionals. It will also reinforce the European skills base by developing training structures for professionals and researchers and prepare the market launch of technologies through a series of Demonstration Testbeds for media professionals;
• The RTD programme includes long-term research and medium-term work designed to result in novel products and services at the component and system level by the end of the project.

Semantic Based Network Management (SemNetMan)

The project SemNetMan (semantic based network/cluster management) combines two methods relevant for the knowledge society: the social network analyses (SNA) and techniques of the semantic web. The resulting method should enable efficient network management within the scope of project environments and related requirements. The design of the methodology is embedded in three use cases: the network of the Semantic Web School, the Platform Wissensmanagement and the Austrian Biogasnetzwerk. The project is realized by seven Austrian organisations from research to industry containing specialists from network management, semantic technologies and social network analyses. SemNetMan is supported by the protecNETplus programm of FFG.

Semantic Engineering Support Environment (SEnSE)

The SENSE project deals with the development on an Engineering Support Environment which improves communication in product development processes. The scenarios targeted by the SENSE project are intelligent change management, engineering rationale detection and conflict resolution and redesign of existing products. While state-of-the-art solutions are rather static and process-oriented, SENSE is highly flexible and is oriented to support communication processes. SENSE build on top of state-of-the- art R&D results in the area of multi-agent systems, semantics and tuple spaces. Within the project a set of scientific and technological innovations will be developed. Semantic facades will allow the semantic enrichment of legacy data. A minimum high level ontology will provide standardized communication means for inter-system communication. Specific dynamically adaptable reasoning mechanisms will be developed. A novel form of communication infrastructure combining message-based on triple-space based communication will be developed. A mechanisms for engineering rationale detection and conflict resolution building on leading-edge basic research in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Semantics will be developed.

Semantic Mediation of Legacy Data Sources (SEML)

Within this project we develop tools and services enabling the interoperability of heterogeneous, distributed data sources. By using semantic web technologies we can precisely define the structure and semantics of legacy data sources.

Based on these definitions the rules to exchange data between several data sources are created in a semi-automatic way. SEML can process whole data bases or just the parts returned by a particular query. SEML consists of two components: a graphic user interface (SEML Modeller) and a runtime environment for the conversion tasks (SEML Transformation Service).

Semantic Web Applications in Business Information Systems (SWABIS)

Within the past five years, the Semantic Web research community has brought to maturity a comprehensive set of foundational technology components, and this both at the conceptual level and in the form of prototypes and software. This includes, among other assets, ontology engineering methodologies, standardized ontology languages, ontology engineering tools, and infrastructure like APIs, repositories, and scalable reasoners, plus a plethora of work for making the Deep Web and computational functionality in the form of Web Services accessible at a semantic level. However, in order for these research achievements to materialize into large scale corporate applications, they must be complemented by prototypes, methods, and best practices which support enterprises in the adoption of Semantic Web technology. In this project, we will develop

1. convincing showcases and proofs-of-concept that demonstrate the technical feasibility in relevant business scenarios;

2. methods to assess the costs and business value of semantic technology; in particular, such that help estimate the costs involved in the development and usage of ontologies, and to quantify the operational and strategic benefits of ontology-based systems; and

3. metrics to evaluate and compare existing ontologies, ontology engineering methodologies, and tools in terms of technical quality and organizational fit. This includes metrics to determine the usability of a particular ontology in a specific business scenario.

Semantic Web enabled Web Services (SWWS)

Web services promise a new level of service on top of current web. However, in order to employ their full potential, appropriate description means for web services need to be developed. Current technology around UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP provide limited support in mechanizing service recognition, service configuration and combination, service comparison and automated negotiation. Therefore, the main objectives of SWWS are to provide a comprehensive Web Service description framework, to define a Web Service discovery framework, and to provide a scalable Web Service mediation.

In order to evaluate the overall approach, SWWS will provide a Semantic Web based Web Service platform which will service as a basis for three case studies, one in the B2C area and two in the B2B area, that cover a wide range of potential further E-Business applications.

Semantic Web Fred (SWF)

The FRED system developed by Net Dynamcis is a software platform which integrates agent technology, ontologies, Semantic Web Service technologies, and dynamic process technologies. Such integrated systems are needed for Semantic Web Platforms which represent the next generation of mediator systems. In this project, the existing technologies of the FRED system for automated goal resolution, i.e. how to find a suitable Service (internal or external Web Service) for solving a Goal that has been assigned to an agent, will be extended in terms of dynamics.

The major objectives are:

• Specification of a Description Language for Goals and Services
• Implementation of a Reasoning Engine for dynamic automated Goal Resolution
• A framework for extracting web content into the FRED system
• Use case implementations for showcasing

Semantically-Enabled Knowledge Technologies (SEKT)

The vision of SEKT is to develop and exploit the knowledge technologies which underlie Next Generation Knowledge Management. We envision knowledge workplaces where the boundaries between document management, content management, and knowledge management are broken down, and where knowledge management is an effortless part of day to day activities. Appropriate knowledge is automatically delivered to the right people at the right time at the right granularity via a range of user devices. Knowledge workers will be empowered to focus on their core roles and creativity; this is key to European competitiveness. The execution of SEKT is based on the integration of fundamental research, component development and integration driven by real world case studies in the public and private sectors. SEKT will provide new insights on knowledge technologies together with open reference implementations for others to build on.

SemanticGov

SemanticGov aims at building the infrastructure (software, models, services, etc) necessary for enabling the offering of semantic web services by public administration (PA). Through this cutting edge infrastructure, SemanticGov will address longstanding challenges faced by public administrations such as achieving interoperability amongst PA agencies both within a country as well as amongst countries, easing the discovery of PA services by its customers, facilitating the execution of complex services often involving multiple PA agencies in interworkflows. More importantly, this infrastructure will exploit SemanticGov as an enabler for total reengineering of PA service provision and propose a paradigm shift of today's modus operandi.

SemBiz

The SemBiz project aims at bridging the gap between the business level perspective and the technical implementation level in Business Process Management (BPM) by semantic descriptions of business processes along with respective tool support. Current BPM technologies mainly focus on the level of technical details for handling and executing IT-supported business processes, neglecting the fact that BPM techniques are supposed to support handling of business processes at the business level. This results in the need for human expertise and intervention for mediating between the business and the technical level, which hampers the benefits of such technologies tremendously. Hence, in order to overcome these deficiencies, we aim at developing an exhaustive semantic description framework that allows managing business processes on the business level as well as support for automated execution of business processes on the technical level.

Service Austria: Research and Industry Dissemination (SARID)

After four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly artificial intelligence. Emerging technologies as the Semantic Web and Web services transform the Internet from an information network into a network of knowledgeable services, this trend being supported by major technology vendors as well as established standardization bodies. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. Hence there is a need for novel mechanisms for searching them, and service frameworks which allow these services to be used in innovative applications and business models. In this context machine-processable semantics is seen as one of the major instruments to cope with certain limitations at societal, economical and technological level. The overall mission of the SARID is foster the Semantically Enabled Service-oriented Architecture (SESA) revolution on a world-wide scale. We will coordinate and organize a a comprehensive inventory of dissemination activities designated to strengthen the research community working on semantic systems and services and to speed up the take up of the technology at industry level. SARID will be a joint initiative of STI International and STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck.

Service Austria: Research and Industry Training (SARIT)

After four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly artificial intelligence. Emerging technologies as the Semantic Web and Web services transform the Internet from an information network into a network of knowledgeable services, this trend being supported by major technology vendors as well as established standardization bodies. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. Hence there is a need for novel mechanisms for searching them, and service frameworks which allow these services to be used in innovative applications and business models. In this context machine-processable semantics is seen as one of the major instruments to cope with certain limitations at societal, economical and technological level. The overall mission of the SARIT is foster the Semantically Enabled Service Oriented Architecture (SESA) revolution on a world-wide scale. We will coordinate and organize a comprehensive training program dedicated to the field of Semantic Web Services (SWS), including a Semantic Web Services retreat, seminars, workshops and tutorials for researchers and professionals. SARIT will be a joint initiative of STI International and STI-Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck.

Service Bundler (Service Bundler)

The mission of the Service Bundler project is to study, design, develop and prototype an open, self-adaptive and generic SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) integrated platform with its primary research focus on composition and monitoring of services. We will develop a Service Bundler business-pervasive platform that will enable to integrate, compose and expose in a secure and adaptive way innovative services. This will be done by applying business rules and self-adaptive decision-support guidelines to guarantee the best combination of the needed services by taking into account the business context. The role of the Service Bundler project would be to provide a set of core technologies for the base seekda Service Platform. We aim to allow the use of abstract process templates – enabling the composition of available Web Services – such that, with the support of a monitoring mechanism, they can be executed consecutively without any user interaction in-between. Even if some of these services would not perform as initially expected, these should remain transparent to the end user. From an external perspective, such a composition (or bundle as we call it in this proposal) of services would act like one service, offering a specific eCommerce functionality. The fact that this functionality is only reached after executing multiple services should be hidden behind seekda’s platform.

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.

Service Web 3.0

Even after four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly intelligent applications. Emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web or Web Services transform the Internet from a network of information to a network of knowledge and services. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. It is the mission of Service Web 3.0 to address these emerging developments and contribute to the implementation of framework programmes and their projects, and support the preparation of future community research and technological development.

The focus of Service Web 3.0 will be to:

• Create, maintain, and publish roadmaps as a means to plan and coordinate framework and community activities for a future service world.
• Set-up of dedicated cross-project clusters focusing on Semantic Web Services within STI International.
• Provide information material such as white papers, feasibility studies, promotional movies for raising the awareness for the technology in industry, introducing new business models and systematically facilitating Semantic Web Services and Semantic Web technology adoption, in particular for SMEs.
• Support standardization activities for semantic service descriptions.
• Exploit synergies through networking and cross-fertilization with other research and network projects related to this area.
• Organize special focused conferences and seminars.

Service Web 3.0 will pave the way to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology.

SHAPE

Modelling is an integrated part of software engineering approaches. Business process models are widely used to describe how work is done within an organization, while various product models describe what is done. Various approaches based on model-driven engineering (MDE) concepts, such as the OMG MDA (Model Driven Architecture) and related efforts around domain-specific languages have gained much popularity. Business models are described in the computation-independent models (CIMs) while for the product models, the model-driven approach separates platform-independent models (PIMs) from the platform-specific ones (PSMs) in order to abstract the implementation technologies.

The objective of SHAPE is to support the development and the realization of enterprise systems based on Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous Architectures(SHA). SHA extends service-oriented architecture (SOA) with semantics and heterogeneous infrastructures (Web services, agents, Semantic Web Services,P2P and grid) under a unified service-oriented approach. SHAPE will develop a model-driven engineering (MDE) tool-supported methodology. SHAPE will take an active role in the standardization of metamodels and languages for SHA. The technical results will be compliant with the proposed standards to ensure high industry acceptance. In current SOA approaches, business requirements and technical details are intertwined constraining the evolution of service-oriented business solutions. SHAPE will provide metamodels and languages, methods and tools to separate the different viewpoints of SOA for the development of semantically-enabled, flexible and adaptive business services on a rich SHA-infrastructure.

Single European Employment Market-Place (SEEMP)

The mission of the present SEEMP (Single European Employment Market-Place) proposal is: to design and implement in a prototypal way an interoperability architecture for public e-Employment services which encompasses cross-governmental business and decisional processes, interoperability and reconciliation of local professional profiles and taxonomies, semantically enabled web services for distributed knowledge access and sharing. In particular, the SEEMP project will develop an EIF-compliant federated architecture and interoperability middleware as well as applicative plug-in services to allow existing National/Local job market places and data warehouses to be interoperable at pan-European level by overcoming state-of-the-art limitations.

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.

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.

SUPER

Business Process Management focuses on managing the execution of IT-supported business operations from a business expert's process view rather than from a technical perspective. The underlying motivation for BPM is that organizations need to continuously align their running business processes, as executed within multiple heterogeneous systems, with the required processes as derived from business needs. BPM has gained significant attention in both research and industry, and a range of BPM tools are available. However, the degree of mechanization in BPM is currently very limited. The major obstacle preventing a coherent view on business processes is that the business processes are not accessible to machine reasoning. Additionally, businesses cannot query their process space by logical expressions, e.g. in order to identify activities relevant to comply with regulations. Founded on ontologies Semantic Web technology provides scalable methods and tools for the machine-readable representation of knowledge. Semantic Web Services (SWS) make use of Semantic Web technology to support the automated discovery, substitution, composition, and execution of software components (Web Services). BPM is a natural application for Semantic Web and SWS technology, because the latter provide large-scale, standardized knowledge representation techniques for executable artefacts. Our proposal is to combine SWS and BPM, and develop one consolidated technology. Specifically, we will create horizontal ontologies which describe business processes; vertical telecommunications oriented ontologies to support domain-specific annotation for our chosen economic sector; and a suite of tools based on the results of the SEKT and DIP IPs. Together with the other ESSI projects this will further strengthen the global leadership of EU-funded technology development.

SWING

SWING aims at deploying Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology in the geospatial domain. In particular, we address two major obstacles that must be overcome for SWS technology to be generally adopted, i.e. to reduce the complexity of creating semantic descriptions and to increase the number of semantically described services. Today, a comprehensive knowledge of logics, ontologies, metadata and various specification languages is required to describe a service semantically. We will develop methods and tools that can hide the complexity - and automate the creation - of the necessary semantic descriptions. The objective of SWING is to provide an open, easy-to-use SWS framework of suitable ontologies and inference tools for annotation, discovery, composition, and invocation of geospatial web services. SWING builds on the DIP and SEKT IPs, by adopting, combining and reinforcing their results. A main key to the solution is adapting the SWS technology of DIP to handle geospatial services and content. Another key is utilising and advancing the technology of SEKT to annotate geospatial services with semantic information. A targeted synergy between these two research initiatives are demanded to maintain and extend Europe's leading role in SWS. The SWING framework and pilot application will increase the use of distributed and heterogeneous services in geospatial decision making. The results can be reused in other domains and will boost the availability of semantic services and bring the vision of the SWS a great leap forward. Exploitation of SWING's results will provide Europe's decision makers and citizens with a new paradigm of information retrieval and new business opportunities.

SWSW

The aim of the project “SWSW: Semantic Web Services Week”, held in the week of 6-10 June 2005 in Innsbruck with local organization by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute DERI, is to provide a forum for interchange and strengthening of the European, especially Austrian position and contributions to future standards in emerging Web technologies. The central event of the SWSW is a Workshop on "Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services” organized by the Semantic Web Services Interest Group of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This workshop intends to serve as a starting point for future standardization activities on Semantic Web Services. The SWSW provides surrounding events to this workshop in order to better position and strengthen the work and contributions around the Web Service Modeling Ontology WSMO, a comprehensive framework for Semantic Web Services mainly developed at DERI. The project “SWSW: Semantic Web Services Week” funded by the FFG under the FIT-IT programme has officially been scheduled from 01-April-2005 until 30-June- 2005. The project has been comprised of three major milestones (preparation, conduction, post-processing). All activities planned for this project have been accomplished successfully and on time. Besides, we can report several achievements with respect to the positioning and strengthening of European and especially Austrian work around Semantic Web Services within international research and standardization activities.

TripCom

The mission of TripCom is to take a significant move towards a new era of the Internet. The Internet was invented in the 1960's and provides a highly decentralized and scalable architecture for enabling large networks of computers beyond the boundaries of other communication protocols. The next step for the Internet is likely to be the direct integration of applications and computers via Web service technology. This network no longer directly interlinks humans but interlinks applications and programs to provide integrated services to the human end-user. However, current Web service technology has only very little to do with the Web. It is based on the message exchange paradigm similar to email communication. Truly Web-enabled Web services will communicate via persistent publication of information. Realizing this vision and a new technology is the mission of TripCom with the result being based on the integration of Tuple Space, Semantic Web (triple), and Web service technologies. To this end, we on the one hand plan to improve Tuple Space technology by adding semantics and means to structure and relate tuples in a scalable and linkable Triple Space architecture. On the other hand we plan to improve Web service technologies by adopting the flexible and powerful asynchronous communication model of Tuple Spaces.

Triple Space Computing (TSC)

Triple Space Computing is a very simple and powerful paradigm that inherits the communication model from Tuple Space Computing model and projects it in the context of the Semantic Web. Instead of sending messages forward and backward among participants, like most of today's web applications do, future triple-based applications will just use a simple communication based on writing and reading RDF triples in a shared space. Clever middleware is required to provide a virtual Global Semantic Space without requiring each application either to download or to search through the entire Semantic Web. Triple Space Computing as a new paradigm for coordination and communication compliant with the design principles of the Web, thus provides a major building block for the Semantic Web and for interoperation of Semantic Web services.