Projects

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.

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.

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.

By 2015, novel service-oriented management methodologies and the Future Internet universal business infrastructure will enable European virtual factories and enterprises to self-organize in distributed, autonomous, interoperable, non-hierarchical innovation ecosystems of tangible and intangible manufacturing assets, to be virtually described, on-the-fly composed and dynamically delivered as a Service, end-to-end along the globalised value chain."
The first Grand Challenge for MSEE project is to make SSME (Service Science Management and Engineering) evolve towards Manufacturing Systems and Factories of the Future, i.e. from a methodological viewpoint to adapt, modify, extend SSME concepts so that they could be applicable to traditionally product-oriented enterprises; from an implementation viewpoint to instantiate Future Internet service oriented architectures and platforms for global manufacturing service systems. The second Grand Challenge for MSEE project is to transform current manufacturing hierarchical supply chains into manufacturing open ecosystems, i.e. on the one side to define and implement business processes and policies to support collaborative innovation in a secure industrial environment; on the other side to define a new collaborative architecture for ESA (Enterprise Software and Applications), to support business-IT interaction and distributed decision making in virtual factories and enterprises. The synthesis of the two Grand Challenges above in industrial business scenarios and their full adoption in some European test cases will result in new Virtual Factory Industrial Models, where service orientation and collaborative innovation will support a new renaissance of Europe in the global manufacturing context.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.