Projects FP7-ICT-1

ANSWER - Artistic-Notation-based Software Engineering for Film, Animation and Computer Games

A new approach to the creative process of film and game production

ANSWER assists the creative artist to record a distilled, clear,
accurate description of the media she wishes to create. The project
will produce a notion system (DirectorNotation) for describing the
creation of multimedia content. This will offer a bridge between
digital media production and animation for game design. Creative
artists in several domains will be allowed to express creativity in an
artistically significant language. The facility that notes have
provided to music, and dance notation to choreography will be acquired.
The ANSWER tools will optimise the human, artistic, conceptualisation,
understanding and creative mechanisms that lead to the production of
media, and also offer a process of recording this conceptualisation in
a machine-processable representation.

Project coordinator: Institute of Communications and Computer Systems, Greece
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

APIDIS - Autonomous Production of Images based on Distributed and Intelligent Sensing

A framework to automate the collection and distribution of digital content

APIDIS will investigate the automatic extraction of intelligent
content from networks of multi-modal sensors. It will exploit the
knowledge to automate the production of video content for controlled
scenarios (sports events or surveillance). The project will also
consider personalised and potentially interactive content summarization
mechanisms to address heterogeneous user needs and access conditions.
APIDIS will develop applications that are cost-effective and fully
automated production of content dedicated to small-audience (e.g.
personal recordings, university lectures etc.) but also automated
summarization for video surveillance.

Project coordinator: Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 30 months

CASAM - Computer-Aided Semantic Annotation of Multimedia

Human - Machine synergy

CASAM will facilitate the synergy of human and machine intelligence
to significantly speed up the task of human-produced semantic
annotation of multimedia content. The project will deal with the task
of aggregating human and machine knowledge with the ultimate target of
minimizing human involvement in the annotation procedure. Intelligent
human-computer interaction is of central importance, and the concept of
effort-optimized knowledge aggregation will be introduced. This as the
task of reaching the desired result by requiring the least effort from
the user. CASAM will provide a significant boost to the long term goal
of achieving really large-scale and precise annotation of multimedia
documents with minimum human effort.

Project coordinator: Intrasoft International, Luxembourg
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

FOCUS K3D - FOster the Comprehension, adoption and USe of
Knowledge intensive technologies for coding and sharing 3D media
content in consolidated and emerging application communities

With the focus on the awareness of new ways of working with 3D models and objects

FOCUS K3D will support 3D user communities, and help them in the
adoption of best-practices for the integrated use of semantics in 3D
content modelling and processing. The coordination action will promote
a critical mass of interdisciplinary activities to encourage different
communities to learn from each other while contributing valuable skills
to the problems of 3D content and knowledge capture, interpretation and
sharing. It will also coordinate actions devoted to the dissemination
of available research solutions to a wide community of users. FOCUS K3D
has identified a number of applications that are both consolidated in
the massive use of 3D digital resources (like Medicine and
Bioinformatics or Product Modelling) and emerging (like Gaming or
Archaeology).

Project coordinator: CNR-IMATI-GE, Italy
Project type: CA
Start date: *
Duration: 24 months

i3DPost - intelligent 3D content extraction and manipulation for film and games

High quality 3D content

i3DPost will develop new methods and intelligent technologies for
the extraction of structured 3D content models from video, at a level
of quality suitable for use in digital cinema and interactive games.
The research will enable the increasingly automatic manipulation and
re-use of characters, with changes of viewpoint and lighting. i3DPost
will combine advances in 3D data capture, 3D motion estimation,
post-production tools and media semantics. The result will be film
quality 3D content in a structured form, with semantic tagging, which
can be manipulated in a graphic production pipeline and reused across
different media platforms.

Project coordinator: The Foundry, UK
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

SMARTMUSEUM - Cultural Heritage Knowledge Exchange Platform

Full benefit of the multi-source digitalised cultural information

SMARTMUSEUM will establish a platform for enhanced experience
resulting from interaction between visitors and cultural heritage
objects. The platform incorporates secure adaptive profiling, on-site
local distributed knowledge and global digital cultural information
access. Developments will also include semantic web services for
cultural heritage related knowledge search and the software for
delivering the cultural heritage knowledge exchange. The future smart
museum IT infrastructure and services will increase the interaction
between multilingual European citizens and cultural heritage objects.

Project coordinator: APPRISE OU, Estonia
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 26 months

ACTIVE - Enabling the Knowledge Powered Enterprise

Effective means for supporting the productivity of knowledge workers

ACTIVE technology aims at increasing the productivity of knowledge
workers through tools that leverage hidden factual and procedural
knowledge. The project will advance research and integrate technologies
to realise the vision of an integrated and contextualised knowledge
workspace, which will result in the ACTIVE Knowledge Workspace. This
platform is open and scalable and well integrated into existing desktop
applications and intranet portal solutions of an enterprise. ACTIVE
will generate sustainable impact by deploying the tools and
applications in three industry sectors: consulting, telecommunication
and engineering.

Project coordinator: British Telecommunications, UK
Project type: IP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

JUMAS - Judicial Management by Digital Libraries Semantics

An advanced audio and video knowledge management system

JUMAS addresses the need to build an infrastructure able to optimise
the information workflow in order to facilitate later analysis. New
models and techniques for representing and automatically extracting the
embedded semantics derived from multiple data sources will be
developed. The most important goal of the JUMAS system is to collect,
enrich and share multimedia documents annotated with embedded semantic
minimising manual transcription activity. JUMAS is tailored at managing
situations in which multiple cameras and audio sources are used to
record assemblies in which people debates and event sequences need to
be semantically reconstructed for future consultations. The prototype
of JUMAS will be tested interworking with legacy systems, but the
system can be viewed as able to support business processes and
problem-solving in a variety of domains.

Project coordinator: Project Automation, Italy
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 30 months

KIWI - Knowledge in a Wiki

The wiki way

KIWI will develop an advanced knowledge management system based on a
semantic wiki. The KIWI system will support collaborative knowledge
creation and sharing, and use semantic descriptions and reasoning as a
means to intelligently author, change and deliver content. The KIWI
vision will describe how the 'convention over configuration' paradigm
of wikis combined with semantic technologies can lead to flexible and
problem-oriented knowledge management. The project will evaluate the
system in two use cases in the area of software and project knowledge
management, and the software will be published as OpenSource to ensure
a broad uptake and sustainability of the project results.

Project coordinator: Salzburg Research, Austria
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

KYOTO - Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization

A collaborative tool for environmental organisations

KYOTO is a generic system offering knowledge transition from any
domain of knowledge and information, across different target groups in
society and across linguistic, cultural and geographic borders. It
represents a new concept of information mining through knowledge
mining. The project developments will be enabled through an ontology
linked to wordnets for a variety of languages. Concept extraction and
data mining is applied through a chain of semantic processors. KYOTO
addresses the need for global and uniform transition of knowledge
across different types of organisations. This is particularly critical
in the environmental domain, but collaborative knowledge sharing in the
medical, security or legal area can be set up quickly in Europe using
the KYOTO mechanism.

Project coordinator: Faculty of Arts, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

Service-Finder - Realising Web Service Discovery at Web Scale

Web Services Search Engine

Service-Finder will develop a platform for service discovery in
which Web Services are embedded in a Web 2.0 environment. The project
addresses the problem of utilising the Web Service technology for a
wider audience by realising a comprehensive framework for Discovery.
The approach is to develop novel means of obtaining the underlying
semantic models for discovery, by analysing available Web content,
leverage direct and indirect user feedback on the extracted data and
exploiting context information. The result will be a Search Engine that
enables users to find up-to-date information on available Web Services,
similarly to current search engines for content pages.

Project coordinator: CEFRIEL, Italy
Project type: STREP
Start date: *
Duration: 24 months

VALUE-IT - Adding Value to RTD: Accelerating Take-up of Semantic Technologies for the Enterprise

Dynamic links between research and business environments

VALUE-IT will address the need to improve the European performance
in producing socio-economically relevant RTD results, and to accelerate
innovation. The support action will cooperate with and provide focused
support to STE applied researchers and related industry stakeholders in
order to add value to research endeavours. By implementing a Support
Mechanism consisting of interlinked activities, such as business demand
driven and ST innovation roadmapping, 'matchmaking' and awareness
raising support, VALUE-IT will help to move semantic technologies to
the mainstream market.

Project coordinator: INMARK Estudios y Estrategias, Spain
Project type: SA
Start date: *
Duration: 26 months

WeKnowIt - Emerging, Collective Intelligence for personal, organisational and social use

Novel techniques for generating different layers of intelligence

WeKnowIt aims to develop techniques for exploiting multiple layers
of intelligence from user-contributed content, which together
constitute Collective Intelligence. The project will provide technology
able to support a paradigm shift, establishing a foundation for a new
generation of services and tools supporting communities of users. The
approach is built around different Intelligence Layers (Personal,
Media, Mass, Social and Organisational) which address various aspects
of user contributed and consumed content. The emphasis will be on
integration and bridging (e.g. social and content dimensions) and the
mobile and organisational - business aspects. WeKnowIt will demonstrate
the wide applicability of its achievements through the elaboration on
two distinct case studies: an Emergency response and a Consumers Social
Group case study.

Project coordinator: CERTH - ITI, Greece
Project type: IP
Start date: *
Duration: 36 months

LarKC - The Large Knowledge Collider: a platform for large scale integrated reasoning and Web-search

Not just a single reasoning engine, but a generic platform and an open architecture

LarKC will develop the Large Knowledge Collider, an open-source
pluggable distributed infrastructure for real-time incomplete reasoning
and search, exploiting techniques and heuristics from areas as diverse
as databases, machine learning, cognitive science and Semantic Web. The
platform will fulfil needs in sectors that are dependent on massive
heterogeneous information sources such as telecommunication services,
bio-medical research, and drug-discovery. LarKC is designed to harness
the efforts of various research communities so as to deliver the
paradigm shift required for reasoning at Web scale.

Project coordinator: Universitaet Innsbruck, Austria
Project type: IP
Start date: *
Duration: 42 months

OKKAM - Enabling the Web of Entities. A scalable and
sustainable solution for systematic and global identifier reuse in
decentralised information environments

Entity identifiers should not be multiplied beyond necessity

OKKAM will deliver a secure and privacy aware open source
infrastructure to manage entity references. Just as the WWW enables a
global decentralised network of documents, connected by hyperlinks,
OKKAM will provide a global digital space for publishing and managing
information about entities, where every entity is uniquely identified,
entities can be reused across digital resources and links between
entities can be explicitly specified and exploited in a variety of
scenarios. OKKAMs repository of global identifiers is designed to
support forms of information integration that are currently simply
impossible. The entity-oriented approach to content and knowledge
management will be validated in relevant applications in industries
like scientific publishing, news and product support.

Project coordinator: University of Trento, Italy
Project type: IP
Start date: *
Duration: 30 months