German Research Center on Artificial Intelligence GmbH
DFKI
Germany
C-F
British Telecommunications plc
British Telecom
United Kingdom
P
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
EPFL
Switzerland
C-S
Motorola
MOT
France
P
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
UPC
Spain
P
Start Date :1st November 2001
Duration : 18 months
IST-2000-28385
AGENTCITIES.RTD
Testbed for a Worldwide Agent Network: Research and Development Project Summary The Agentcity vision is: An ambient proactive environment where heterogeneous autonomous and increasingly intelligent systems representing businesses, services and individuals are able to interact with each other in a peer to peer manner and enable flexible and dynamic composition of services. Knowledge, information and service sharing is effectively available to users and organisations. When new pertinent or innovative services are available they are immediately offered to the appropriate user. Services are automatically discovered and integrated at the right level of interaction. Ontology, security, reputation and trust services in the environment should further enrich the range of businesses and private interactions possible between agent peers. Furthermore, the environment should be open to allow new services and systems to be connected and integrated semantically by coming on-line automatically. The primary objectives of this project are: (a) to create a realistic, decentralised open environment which enableshigh level semantic interoperability between systems to support formation of novel, dynamic value constellations, b) to build sufficient knowledge and understanding of dynamic open environments to enable transition to widespread usage in reliable commercial grade systems. The project addresses dynamic value constellations in Four ways: (1) Designing and deploying an open extensible network environment which can support heterogeneous service building blocks composable into new value added service (2) The integration of business services into the environment to support rich interactions (3) The bringing together agent level communication technologies to provide a unified framework for modelling dynamic application services and (4)Demonstration points to show some of the depth and breadth of the world wide network of agent platforms and services. The AgentCities project constitutes the first project of its kind for the purpose of setting up a world wide network of always running FIPA platforms, to be used as a testbed for standard validation as well as for standard-based agent services deployment.
Contact point
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
DFKI
D
P
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
EPFL
CH
CS
Fujitsu Labs of America
FLA
US
P
Imperial College of Science Technology & Medicine
ICSTM
UK
P
Queen Mary and Westfield College
QMW
UK
P
Technical University of Catalonia
UPC
E
P
University of Parma
PARMA
I
P
Start Date : July 2001
Duration : 24 months
IST-2000-28401
HYPERKNOWLEDGE
Hypermedia and Pattern Based Knowledge Management for Smart Organisations
Project Summary This project aims at two kinds of objectives. The user organisations want to improve their work practices through participatory business modelling as well as exploiting knowledge in support of organisational activities, in the spirit of “smart" organisations. The providers want to customise and validate the yet untested integration of their novel technologies in these real-world environments prior to commercialisation. Verbundplan, the consulting daughter of a major European energy supplier (Verbund, Austria) needs to leverage incompletely specified corporate knowledge in the strong competition of the deregulated energy market. The City of Riga, Latvia, needs it for improving its management processes. By achieving those objectives in this project, primarily the EC objective of efficiency improvements is supported.
The novel technology to be used for achieving these objectives is an integration of the EKP (Enterprise Knowledge Patterns) methodology developed at KTH, Sweden, and the hypermedia-based RETH tool developed at Siemens Austria. EKP is an approach to participatory business modelling by reusing business knowledge in the form of specific patterns. The RETH tool supports modelling and representing this kind of knowledge actively and allows to "publish" the knowledge easily through Web technology in the respective intranets. Overall, the integration of EKP and RETH allows knowledge management to be based on business patterns as well as the exchange and distribution of corporate knowledge through the intranets. After a training phase, we propose to apply this novel technology by letting both people from user and provider organisations work with the RETH tool, where the latter serve primarily as consultants. Already available patterns from previous EKP applications will be represented in RETH and adapted to the respective user organisations. The tool may already be applicable for supporting the knowledge acquisition in meetings, although this has yet to be tested in a participatory setting. In any case, RETH will serve as an active documentation facility, where all the knowledge will be represented in the form of hypermedia (hypertext and multimedia). RETH can export such documents to Web representations fully automatically. After this application phase, an evaluation phase is planned in order to elaborate on the lessons learned. The user organisations will figure out the utility of this approach with respect to their given objectives. For the providers, the diversity of these user organisations is important to determine the right market segments for the planned commercialisation of their novel integrated technology. Based on the customisation effort in these applications, they will know better for future customisations in the open marketplace.
Contact point
Electronic CoMmerce LeveragIng Network for Developing European Regions Project Summary The overall objective of the project is to fight the existing gap in Europe between the most and least developed regions as far as the use and development of e-commerce is concerned. Within this main frame, the specific objectives of e-MINDER will be:
To raise awareness both in the SMEs sector and within the education and training structures about the use of ICT and its application to the field of e-commerce.
To provide citizens and companies with the required service and support to implement their e-commerce related activities. To achieve all this, a European Network of three Leveraging Centres will be created among the three partner regions.
Telematic Management for Ready-to-Wear Satellite Workshops Project Summary TELEMARA is a project directed to consolidate microcompanies working as satellite workshops for ready-to-wear SMEs as external elements of their production chain, by providing them with an easy-to-use telematic tool to manage and control their reciprocal relationship. Typically, ready-to-wear SMEs work with 10 to 15 satellites, each employing 3 or 4 persons - housewives and their female relatives in more than 90% of the cases - that produce over the 70% of the total output of their central SME. The main features of these satellite workshops are a very high percentage of female representation, a predominance of self-employed persons working at home or at microcompanies located in their vicinity, mostly unskilled labour without promotion possibilities, still some submerged work, virtually no application of management techniques and finally, rudimentary communication system between central company and satellites.
Contact point
Silvia Aracil
Project Manager
Asociación de Investigación de la Industria Textil
Plaza Emilio Sala, 1
03801 Alcoy
Spain
Tel.: +34 96 554 2200
Fax: +34 96 554 3494
E-mail: saracil@aitex.es
URL: www.aitex.es
URL: www.telemara.com
Participants
Participant name
Part. short name
Country
Status*
Asociación de Investigación de la Industria Textil
AITEX
E
C
ALC. Organizació, y Sistemas S.L.
ACTIVA ICON, ICARD
E
P
Compañía Mediterranea de Ediciones de Moda, S.L.
MJN
E
P
Centro Tecnológico das Indùstrias Tëxtil e do Vestuário de Portugal
CITEVE
P
P
Jobarros Industria de Maldhas, LDA
JOBARROS
P
P
S.I..I. 93 Braga-Sociedade de Investimentos Comerciais e Industriais, S.A.
SICI
P
P
Innovatext Textile Engineering and Testing Institute Co.
INNOVATEXT
HU
P
Kanizsanett Ruházati Kft.
KANIZSANETT Kft.
HU
P
Start Date : July 2001
Duration : 18 months
IST-2000-28413
INDIA
Intelligent Networking of Dynamically Interrelated Actors Project Summary India will develop and test a methodology and an Internet based service, to transform the structure of a traditional company (Constellation Driver) value chain, from a sequence of activities involving a limited number of partners to a dynamic organisation with constellation of enterprises. India will support the CD to move from bilateral to flexible relations to take fully advantage from increased competition between the participants. India will create a network of actors that will dynamically and seamlessly react to the CD actions. India platform will be based on Artificial Intelligence(AI), Natural Languages Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) technologies. India will include e: analysis of the requirements, design, development and testing of the software platform and identification of the India methodology. The methodology and the platform will be validated by a company working on the EU market and its supply chain.
Contact point
ASSESSING THE DEPLOYMENT, HOSTING AND INTEGRATION OF BUSINESS-CRITICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS BY APPLICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS Project Summary This project investigates the deployment, hosting and integration of business-critical information systems by the Application Service Provider (ASP) industry. ASPs are companies that manage and deliver application capabilities to multiple organisations via data centres operating across a wide area network. The industry is of increasing importance to European companies and predicted as a major growth area with revenues from ASP services expected to grow to €30.03 trillion by 2002 (Dataquest). The ASP model offers new opportunities and threats, building on previous forms of IT outsourcing, with the added need to partner with telecommunications organisations, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Internet Service Providers for example. Consequently, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will need to ensure that the provision of business critical applications by ASPs will meet cost, performance and quality of service targets.
Contact point