SEE Unit - Projects

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.

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):

• peer-driven organization of social activities (such as going out, going to the movies, exchanging books, organizing a social gathering, etc.);
• soliciting peer help with housekeeping and other daily activities;
• allowing support organizations to “push” relevant content to interested elderly users;
• allowing caregivers, facilitators and family members to receive alerts if certain expected home activities of the elderly people are interrupted;
• responding to emergency situations that may ask for immediate action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 of the integrating 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.

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.

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.

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 domainspecific 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 SDK1 projects this will further strengthen the global leadership of EU-funded technology development.

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.

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 ofenterprise systems based on Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous Architectures(SHA). SHA extends service-oriented architecture (SOA) with semantics andheterogeneous 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-supportedmethodology. SHAPE will take an active role in the standardization ofmetamodels and languages for SHA. The technical results will be compliantwith the proposed standards to ensure high industry acceptance. In current SOA approaches, business requirements and technical details areintertwined constraining the evolution of service-oriented businesssolutions. SHAPE will provide metamodels and languages, methods and tools toseparate the different viewpoints of SOA for the development ofsemantically-enabled, flexible and adaptive business services on a rich SHAinfrastructure.

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.

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.

“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-bedeveloped 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.