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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.

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.

While the mass consumers' demand and expectations in the energy efficiency field grow, the providers and manufacturers of electrical appliances are searching for the approaches and infrastructures enabling them to build new kind of added-value services, based on the large volumes of data available from the appliances. Thus, the goal of the project OpenFridge is to design and develop a pilot simple and scalable Internet of Things data infrastructure, empowering building new services based on the typical home appliance data, e.g. data on the energy consumption of the fridge. The infrastructure would be comprised of semantic domain models for opening of the appliances data, data analytics module for aggregation of the raw Internet of Things energy data in adding value energy efficiency information, as well as provisioning of this information to interested stakeholders (appliance manufacturers, end users, utilities, municipalities, etc.) under the new access mechanisms and business models. Further, the pilot service prototypes will showcase the OpenFridge approach and infrastructure, and involve the real end user communities with varying sociodemographic factors and gender characteristics.

EuTravel aims (1) to support the EU agenda towards an open and single market for mobility services by enabling travelers to organize a multimodal trip in accordance with their own criteria including environmental performance, providing multimodal travel service providers an effective way to deliver customized services addressing any type of specialized travel needs and facilitating fact-based EU policy making, (2) to promote the creation of content, open and linked data for travelers enriching the travelling experience and (3) to support travel industry players join forces towards realizing an EU shared seamless mobility strategy and architecture.

EuTravel will research and demonstrate Inter-modal travel optimized with respect to synchronization.

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.

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; (iv) allowing caregivers, facilitators and family members to receive alerts if certain expected home activities of the elderly people are interrupted; (v) responding to emergency situations that may ask for immediate action.

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.

PRELIDA will target the particular stakeholders of the Linked Data community, including data providers, service providers, technology providers and end user communities. These stakeholders have not been traditionally targeted by the Digital Preservation community, and are typically not aware of the digital preservation solutions already available. So an important task of PRELIDA is to raise awareness of existing preservation solutions and to facilitate their uptake.

At the same time, the Linked Data cloud has specific characteristics in terms of structuring, interlinkage, dynamicity and distribution, that pose new challenges to the preservation community.

PRELIDA will organise in-depth discussions among the two communities to identify which of these characteristics require novel solutions, and to develop road maps for addressing the new challenges.