U-INFOR-ME

Universal Information Matrix Engine

Prop osal Numb er: IST-2001-32011

Part C

February 21, 2001 1

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Contents

1 Description of the Consortium 3

2 Description of the participants 4 2

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

1 Description of the Consortium

The consortium consists of leading academic and industrial researchers see table 1. The com-

plementary skills, exp eriences and geographical spread of the consortium will ensure that the

pro ject has the necessary resources to successfully manage and deliver rst class results to the

b ene ts of the EU Community.

Four partners in the pro ject are based in prestigious centres: GU Glasgow, UN PADU I

Padova, FUB Rome and QM London are institutes of higher learning and research. KPMG

Amsterdam and ED Athens are two active commercial companies. KPMG provides general

services for electronic commerce and Web applications, whereas ED provides p ersonalised In-

ternet/ Web solutions while building information adjusted to business requirements and/ or

customer needs.

They have b een chosen b ecause of their proved exp ertise in the required elds and b ecause they

complement nicely each other's comp etence.

KPMG will bring to the consortium its extensive exp erience in the selection and implementation

of software to ols and Web technology as well as its exp erience in Web-based electronic commerce

solutions, a eld that will b e also addressed by the pro ject through a sp eci c case study. KPMG

also brings to the pro ject the necessary knowledge and exp erience of the market that only a

pure commercial partner can have. ED will bring to the consortium its knowledge in building

p ersonalised p ortals on Internet. KPMG and ED Will be mainly resp onsible of the software

development part of our prop osal.

On the other hand, GU, UN PADU I, FUB and QM have b een on the forefront in developing

advanced hyp ermedia retrieval systems, knowledge management systems and in the development

of intelligent agents and database searching.

There will b e two imp ortant levels of management in the consortium: one at the site level, and

the other for the pro ject as a whole. The pro ject will b e managed by the co-ordinating contractor,

Partner CO1 University of Glasgow, which will act as the project leader and co-ordinator for the

technical as well as for the nancial management of the pro ject. The Department of Computing

Science at the University of Glasgow is one of the most exp erienced UK Departments in terms of

EU-funded pro ject supp ort and has b een active in that domain since 1984. Using this exp erience,

plus the extensive exp erience of some of the other partners in EU-funded pro jects, we will rep eat

our successful formula of managing and co-ordinating EU pro jects.

The pro ject leader, Prof. Keith van Rijsb ergen, will b e in charge of assessing how the work is

pro ceeding. The progress of the pro ject will be measured against the schedule of deliverables

and milestones. Redirection of resources or other corrective actions will be taken when and

where appropriate. In case of con ict among the consortium memb ers, the pro ject leader will

intervene. Details ab out con ict resolution will b e included in the consortium agreement to b e

signed by all partners. 3

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Participant Participant Participant name Participant Country

Role Number short name

CO 1 University of Glasgow GU UK

CR 2 UniversityofPadova UN PADU I I

CR 3 Fondazione Ugo Bordoni FUB I

CR 4 Queen Mary, University of London QM UK

CR 5 KPMG Business Advisory Services KPMG NL

CR 6 Europ ean Dynamics ED EL

Table 1: List of Participants in U-INFOR-ME

2 Description of the participants

We give here a brief description of the 7 consortium memb ers as well as the key p ersons that

will b e involved in the pro ject:

1. GU - University of Glasgow

The Computing Science Department CSD at Glasgow Universityisworld class in its research,

as demonstrated by its achievement of the highest grading 5* in the last UK Research Assess-

ment Exercise, and is also top rated in its teaching. CSD brings to the pro ject its extensive

exp erience in the areas of information retrieval mo delling, multilingual information retrieval,

evaluation of interactive retrieval systems, computational linguistics and Human-communication

interaction. Indeed, the research activity in the department demonstrates particular strengths

in the theory and mathematical underpinnings of Information Retrieval IR. For example, the

work of Van Rijsb ergen in novel approaches to interactive IR and in probabilistic-based retrieval

approaches, or the works of Ounis in theoretically-based multimedia retrieval.

Moreover, Human-Computer Interaction is the central topic of the GlasgowInteractive Systems

group GIST. GIST has a particularly multidisciplinary mix and will strongly contribute to the

user-centred p ersp ective of the pro ject. GIST has b een involved in the EC Mira pro ject, dealing

with the design of user-friendly interactive retrieval systems.

As a training environment, Glasgow CSD already supp orts a thriving community of 68 research

students. Our Graduate Scho ol's growth over recent years cuts against the trend in Scottish

universities. Apart from the sta listed b elow, the IR group involves nine other memb ers,

predominantly p ostgraduate students, and we also have strong links to other lo cal groups such

as those in Strathclyde University's Information Science Department. The collective depth and

breadth of exp ertise is just one contributor to the quality of the environment. Glasgow is

one of the premier sites for the evaluation of IR software, esp ecially with resp ect to its utility

and usability for individual users. In addition, we can draw up on the administrative exp ertise

built up through the department's involvement in many EC pro jects Mira, MIRO, FERMI,

PROSPER, IADIVA, FIDE I & I I, IDOMENEUS, COMMANDOS I & I I, Shap e over the past

years, and also up on a university unit devoted to the supp ort of Europ ean pro jects.

Key persons

 C. J. \Keith" van Rijsb ergen, Professor

Prof. Keith van Rijsb ergen is currently a Senate Assessor on the Court of Glasgow Uni-

versity. 4

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Since ab out 1969 his research has b een devoted to information retrieval, covering b oth the-

oretical and exp erimental asp ects. He has sp eci ed several theoretical mo dels for IR and

seen some of them from the sp eci cation and prototyp e stage through to pro duction. His

current research is concerned with the design of appropriate logics to mo del the ow of in-

formation with applications to multimedia retrieval and structured do cuments. He was the

prime contractor for the Esprit working group Mira Esprit Working Group: 20039 con-

centrating on the evaluation of interactive retrieval systems http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/mira.

He was also involved in many Europ ean funded initiatives suchasMIRO and FERMI. He

sup ervises several PhD students in text, image and audio retrieval. He has recently 1999,

together with Crestani and Lalmas, published a b o ok entitled "Information Retrieval: Un-

certainty and Logics". He is also the author of a well-known b o ok on Information Retrieval.

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/preface.html. He is a fellow of the Royal So ciety of Ed-

inburgh, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and British Computer So ciety. In 1993 he

was app ointed Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. He is chairman of the governing

b oard for the FaradayPartnership:3D-Matic which is concerned with research in 3D image

capture and mo delling, and its exploitation in industry.

 Iadh Ounis, Lecturer

Dr. Iadh Ounis is a Lecturer in the department of Computing Science. He completed his

PhD in Information Retrieval from the Universit Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France. He

was involved in the FERMI, MIRO and Mira Europ ean funded initiatives. He partici-

pated in setting up the Image Pro cessing and Application Lab oratory IPAL in Singa-

p ore, in the context of a joint research program action between the Centre National de

la Recherche Scienti que CNRS, France, the National Universityof Singap ore, and the

Kent Ridge Digital Lab oratories of Singap ore. He was involved in the Digital Images and

Video Applications DIVA pro ject. His research interests include the design of ecient

theoretically-based algorithms for multimedia information retrieval, knowledge discovery

and representation, and recently Web linked analysis and probabilistic ranking functions

for Web collections.

2. UN PADU I- University of Padova

Department of Electronics and Computer Science- Information Management Systems IMS

research group.

The Information Management Systems IMS research group of the UniversityofPadova, brings

to the pro ject its extensive exp erience in the areas of hyp ermedia mo delling and retrieval, auto-

matic construction of hyp ermedia, the information structuring and representation of networked

information sources e.g. Web information sources and text mining.

At present the University of Padova consists of thirteen Faculties: Agriculture, Law, Pharma-

cology, Engineering, Humanities and Philosophy,Teacher Training, Medicine, Natural Sciences,

Political Sciences, Psychology, Statistics, Economics and Veterinary Medicine. The Faculties

organise several lecture courses leading to nal degrees. The numb er of di erent nal "laurea"

degrees awarded in Padova is 45, where in Italy there are over 60 di erent nal degrees.

There are over 50 p ostgraduate sp ecialisation scho ols and 70 courses equivalent to PhD. At

present almost 65,000 students are studying in the university. 5

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Around four thousand p eople work daily in ab out 200 Institutes, Departments, Centres and

Libraries. These have their premises in various old palaces or mo dern buildings in the town

centre or in the outskirts.

The Department of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Padova was estab-

lished on June 1, 1987 and it was joined by scientists formerly working with the Scho ol of

Engineering, with the Scho ol of Statistics, and with the Scho ol of Psychology. In the establish-

ing act of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, its characterising research elds

were identi ed as the following: Bio engineering, Applied and Industrial Electronics, Electronic

Instrumentation, Laser and Quantum Electronics, Theoretical and Applied Computer Science,

Telecommunication and Information Theory, Control and Systems Theory and Applications.

Around 30 professors, 30 asso ciate professors, and 20 assistant professors are at presentworking

in the department together with the technical, administrative and library sta .

The Information Management Systems IMS Research Group is one of the research groups of

the department. The group activities are concerned with the design, mo delling and implementa-

tion of advanced multimedia information management systems. The research is directed toward

the study of information retrieval, hyp ertext and database systems. The group is involved in

Europ ean and Italian research pro jects on technologies and metho dologies for information man-

agement, e.g. semantic networks, digital libraries, Web information management, multilingual

information retrieval.

Key persons

 Maristella Agosti, Professor

Maristella Agosti is a professor of Computer Science, of the Department of Electronics

and Computer Science DEI, University of Padua, Italy. She is the group leader of the

Information Management Systems IMS Research Group of the Department.

Her present research interests are related to digital libraries, metho ds and to ols for in-

formation structuring and representation of networked information resources e.g. World

Wide Web information resources, hyp ertext information retrieval mo dels and systems,

and evaluation of interactive retrieval systems. She has published more than 100 refereed

articles and pap ers on international and national journals and conferences, she has also

authored or co-authored some b o oks on information retrieval mo dels, database design, hy-

p ertext retrieval mo dels, data mo delling in information retrieval, automatic construction of

hyp ertexts for information retrieval, and digital libraries for multimedia collections. From

1990 she is member of the editorial b oard of "Information Pro cessing & Management"

Pergamon Press, and from 1997 she is sub ject area editor for Hyp ermedia of "Infor-

mation Retrieval" Kluwer Academic Publishers. She is program committee member of

several international conferences, including ACM-SIGIR and CIKM.

She has b een involved in several national and international research pro jects, in partic-

ular she has b een the Domain Leader for Information Retrieval and Multimedia of the

IDOMENEUS ESPRIT Network of Excellence No. 6606. She was a member of the Re-

search Panel of the EU Information Engineering programme, Luxemb ourg. She has par-

ticipated in the EEC Pro ject JUKEBOX LIB-JUKEBOX/4-1049, in the EEC Pro ject

EUROIEMASTER IE2012, EEC ESPRIT Working Group No.20039 Mira, and in the

Europ ean Space Agency ESA pro ject on Semantic Network Inter-Op erations ESA-SN. 6

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

 Massimo Melucci, Assistant professor

Massimo Melucci received a "Laurea" degree in Statistics and a Ph.D. degree in Computer

Science 1996, with a thesis on Information Retrieval, from the UniversityofPadova, Italy,

where he is Assistant Professor of Computer Science since 1999.

His present researchinterests are in automatic hyp ertext construction for information re-

trieval, Web information retrieval, knowledge discovery in databases, and data mining. He

has published several refereed articles on international journals and conferences on auto-

matic construction of hyp ertexts for information retrieval, evaluation of Web information

retrieval, passage retrieval, and musical information retrieval.

He has b een involved in national and international research pro jects, in particular in

the IDOMENEUS IRIDES pro ject for the design and development of a prototyp e for the

electronic publishing of a scienti c journal over the Internet, in a bilateral collab oration on

Italian Spanish Information Retrieval ISIR, in INTERDATA an Italian national pro ject

for the development of metho ds and to ols for the management of data and pro cesses on

Internet and Intranet networks, in the feasibility study ADMV for a digital library for the

Venetian music of the eighteen century.

3. FUB - Fondazione Ugo Bordoni

"Fondazione Ugo Bordoni" FUB is a non-pro t organization founded in 1952 "to aid and

promote scienti c and applied research in the eld of telecommunications, computing science,

electronics and p ostal services". Until 2000, FUB carried out the work mainly under the su-

p ervision of Ministry of Communications and was sp onsored by Italian Telecom. Recently,

"Fondazione Ugo Bordoni" has a new statute which sets up "Fondazione Ugo Bordoni" as a

new Research Institute on ICT and the new founders are the ma jor licensed telecommunications

companies. FUB is member of the Standardization Groups in ITU, ISO and ETSI, with also

co{ordinating resp onsibilities.

FUB has a long-standing international exp erience in direct as well as consortium-based col-

lab orations in many research areas: Radio Propagation, Optical Communications, Information

Protection, Telecommunication Networks, Multimedia Communications.

The Information Systems Group ISG of Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, which will be directly in-

volved in the pro ject U-INFOR-ME, brings to the pro ject his strong background in information

retrieval, databases and arti cial intelligence techniques.

Since early 90's, ISG's activities have fo cused on the development of e ective and ecient

metho ds for end-users access to information. The group has b een involved in b oth theoretical and

exp erimental research; wehave develop ed new mo dels, algorithms and prototyp es for information

retrieval and information extraction, exp erimenting with large scale collections including text,

structured databases and Web data.

In particular, ISG investigated the areas of information ltering and dissemination, digital li-

braries, do cument ranking, visualization and navigation of retrieval results, Web metadata e.g.,

XML, RDF, WML, adaptive interface agents, data mining, and multimedia information re-

trieval.

ISG have develop ed several system prototyp es, some of which are available online {VIEWER

Viewing WEb Results, for visualizing Web retrieval results, DANTE Distribution ANalysis 7

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

for Term Extraction, for suggesting terms during Web searches, PROFILE PRObabilistic

FILtEring for a selective dissemination of the news of USENET.

A ma jor result is the development of a do cument retrieval system that was successfully tested in

the text retrieval conference TREC-99, the main international forum for large scale evaluation

of information retrieval systems. FUB's prototyp e was ranked fourth, after New York University,

Microsoft and AT&T, and ahead of ab out forty main ICT companies and universities. ISG have

also conducted several exp erimental studies of interactive information retrieval involving real

users.

Moreover, FUB has an outstanding record of partecipation to pro jects sp onsored by the Eu-

rop ean Union in RACE, ACTS, COST, CTS, DRIVE, ESPRIT and IST with the pro jects

ATLAS, VESPER and STARLITE. FUB has also chaired the "Technical Committee Telecom-

munications" for the COST Programme. FUB has partecipated to the networks of excellence in

Machine Learning MLnet, MLnet 2, in Computational Logic COMPULOG, in Information

Retrieval and DataBases IDOMENEUS, and to the Network of Excellence for Agent-based

Computing Agent Link.

Key persons

 Giambattista Amati, Senior Researcher

Giambattista "Gianni" Amati is senior researcher in the Multimedia Division working at

the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni since 1987. He has b een working in Information Filtering and

Information Retrieval implementing a system on the WEB for the selective dissemination

of news from the USENET and an IR system for exp eriments on TREC collections. His

currentinterests are WEB link analysis and non-parametric probabilistic ranking functions

of Information Retrieval for WEB collections. Since 1998 he is member of Programm

Committee of SIGIR, the main conference on Information Retrieval. He has partecipated to

the ESPRIT BRA "MEDLAR" and to the Europ ean Networks of excellence IDOMENEUS

and COMPULOG. He has published ab out 40 pap ers on refereed journals, b o oks and main

conferences.

 Claudio Carpineto, Pro ject Manager

Claudio Carpineto is the head of the group 'Information systems' at Fondazione Ugo Bor-

doni, in Rome. His researchinterests include Web information systems, information index-

ing and retrieval, user-adapted retrieval interfaces, data mining, and multimedia databases.

He has published ab out sixty pap ers in international journals, b o oks or conference pro ceed-

ings, and served on the program commettee of several international conferences, including

the recent ICCS-2001, ICML-2000, and MSLW-2000. He develop ed a comprehensivedoc-

ument ranking system with a novel comp onent for automatic query expansion that ranked

fourth in the Eighth Text REtrieval Conference TREC-8. He has participated in the

MLnet, Idomeneus, and MLnet2 Network of Excellence.

4. QMU - Queen Mary, University of London

The research of the Information Retrieval group at the Department of Computer Science, at

Queen Mary, University of London, fo cuses on the development, implementation and validation

of formal approaches for representing and retrieving multimedia, structured and heterogeneous

rep ositories of information. 8

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

The information retrieval has a state-of-the-art exp erimental platform, HySpirit, for carrying

large studies on information retrieval, which is also currently b een commercialized. HySpirit

supp orts the ob ject-oriented representation and retrieval of complex ob jects suchashyp ermedia

do cuments, the integration of retrieval and database technology for combined do cument con-

tent and information fact search, and provides a logical platform for exp eriments on retrieval

mo dels and heterogeneous collections.

Queen Mary Information Retrieval research group will bring to the U-INFOR-ME pro ject, its

exp ertise in three key areas: the exp erimental information retrieval platform, HySpirit; prob-

abilistic approaches for information retrieval; and the integration of heterogeneous sources of

evidence.

Since its foundation in 1999, the Information Retrieval group has acquired a numb er of national

and international pro jects, including SAMBITS EU Framework 5 concerned with the devel-

opment of systems for advanced multimedia broadcast and IT services, where Queen Mary role

is the design of access metho ds for navigation and retrieval of complex digital multimedia data

based on the MPEG7 up coming standard for describing multimedia content; GRIS Royal So ci-

ety, which aims to investigate the information seeking b ehaviours of users querying, browsing,

and retrieving structured do cuments; FOCUS I and II EPSRC and British Council, which

aim to investigate e ective metho ds for representing and retrieving structured do cuments; "Re-

trieval through explanation" Library and Information Commission, which aims at developing

formal approaches to relevance feedback. All these pro jects address issues related to the e ec-

tive manipulation of large rep ositories of data in a distributed environment, one concern of the

U-INFORM-ME.

Memb ers of the group, b efore joining Queen Mary, have previously b een active in a number of

Europ ean pro jects and working groups in the area of information retrieval, for instance: FERMI

Formalisation and Exp erimentation on the Retrieval of Multimedia Information, MIRO Mul-

timedia Information Retrieval, MIRA Evaluation of Interactive Multimedia Information Re-

trieval Systems, EuroSearch A Multilingual Europ ean Federated Search Service and Euro-

Gatherer A Personalised Information Gathering System. These pro jects advanced the devel-

opment, implementation and evaluation of empirical and formal approaches to represent and

retrievemultimedia, cross-lingual, distributed, structured and distributed information.

Key persons

 Mounia Lalmas, Senior Lecturer

Dr Mounia Lalmas is a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, which she joined in 1999. Prior to

this, she was a Researcher at the University of Dortmund in 1998, a Lecturer from 1995

to 1997 and Research Fellow from 1997 to 1998 at the University of Glasgow, where she

received her PhD in 1996. Her research interests centre around the development of e ec-

tive formalisms able to mo del information in the places and in the forms that it app ears in

an information retrieval system. In particular, she has exp ertise in knowledge representa-

tion, logical mo dels, mo delling uncertainty; structured and hyp ermedia do cument indexing

and retrieval. She have widely published on these asp ects in conferences, workshops and

journals, and organised a number of related events WIRUL, LUMIS, and has b een on

various programme committees of information retrieval and knowledge managementevents

CIKM, SIGIR, FQAS, BCS IRSG, I I I. 9

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

 Thomas Ro elleke, ResearchFellow

Dr Thomas Ro elleke obtained in 1999 his PhD on probabilistic ob ject-oriented logical

representation and retrieval of complex ob jects. Along with his thesis, he published his

research results in international journals TOIS, conferences SIGIR, and related work-

shops. In 1999, he founded the HySpirit company, transferring his research results and

knowledge into a pro duct development. In 2000, he b ecame a strategic consultant for a

leading direct broker, and was app ointed at the same time a research fellow at Queen Mary.

His current tasks and interests include: information management, strategic IT-consultancy,

data warehousing, data mo delling and software engineering, semi-structured do cument

retrieval, retrieval mo dels and their evaluation, probabilistic ob ject-oriented knowledge

representations, integration of retrieval and database technology, heterogeneous informa-

tion sources, transfer and usage of knowledge.

5. KPMG - KPMG Business Advisory Services

KPMG International is the global advisory rm whose aim is to turn knowledge into value for

the b ene ts of its clients, its p eople, and its communities. With more than 100,000 p eople

collab orating worldwide, the rm provides consulting, tax, and legal, nancial advisory and

assurance services for more than 820 cities in 159 countries. KPMG Business Advisory is part

of KPMG Netherlands, employing more than 160 p eople. Its goal is show clients howtoachieve

world class levels of p erformance in their exploitation and management of IT.

KPMG Business Advisory Services will bring to the pro ject, its extensive exp ertise in e-business

and IT pro jects. The selection and implementation of software to ols and Web technology, suit-

able for e-business, is at the comp etence of KPMG Business Advisory Services. This exp erience

has also a orded KPMG excellent opp ortunity to gain a deep understanding of the links b etween

the needs and use of these new to ols and their implementation as a part of a so-called business

transaction redesign. KPMG BAS exp erience lies also in the eld of pro ject management.

Key persons

 Theo Huib ers, Senior Manager

Dr. Theo Huib ers works as a senior manager within the KPMG BAS unit. He completed

his PhD in Information Science Information Retrieval from the University of Utrecht,

Utrecht, Netherlands, in 1996. He invented a metho d which makes it p ossible to theo-

retically compare information retrieval systems. Dr. Theo Huib ers also worked on the

connection between information discovery and e-commerce. His current sp ecialisation

within KPMG BAS is the redesign of business information pro cesses with the aid of

IT on the basis of a strategic or tactical reorientation. His exp erience sp eci cally lies in

the elds of Package Selection, Information Retrieval, Do cument Management, Work ow

Management and the Web. His key areas of exp erience include: Do cument Management,

Information Retrieval, Organisational changes, and Performance improvements.

 Jero en Van Den Oever, Senior Manager

Jero en is a Senior Manager in KPMG BAS. Jero en has a University degree in business

economics at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the Dutch University of Brabant and

Postgraduate studies in nancial audit at the Dutch University of Brabant. He did the 10

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Intro ductory studies in Management of Information Science at the same University. He

joined KPMG in 1991 in the Dutch practice. Jero en has 9,5 years exp erience in the area

of IT Management and Business Control. He combines his business control background

and work exp erience with education and exp erience in optimisation of business pro cesses of

ICT organisations and the implementation of information retrieval pro jects. He has pro cess

redesign exp erience in b oth core business areas and nancial/administrative pro cesses. His

areas of sp ecialisation include the selection and implementation of integrated packaged

software and the management of organisational change. He has work exp erience in World

Class IT pro jects including b enchmarking and redesign of administrative pro cesses. In

recent years, he gained exp erience in a large number of branches of industry in b oth the

pro t and non-pro t sectors and esp ecially in the communication technology industry. He

has also written several articles ab out work pro cess optimisation and packaged software,

IT management, business control and change management.

 Leo van den Ho ek, Resp onsible Manager

Leo van den Ho ek is a partner and resp onsible for Business Advisory Services in The

Netherlands, the advisory activities of the function Assurance. Leo van den Ho ek is also

chairman of the KPMG Accession Policy Committee. Leo van den Ho ek has b een with

KPMG since 1974, initially as assistant-auditor 1974/1975 and since 1975 as consul-

tant. Leo has worked on a large number of advisory pro jects in the eld of management

b ehaviour and management issues in b oth the pro t and the not-for-pro t sector. In re-

cent years he has worked in particular on the eld of planning & control of organisations

Leo van den Ho ek has also b een involved in the development and teaching of a number

of management-oriented training courses. He has a long exp erience in organisational

management; management & organisation audits; coaching of management teams; man-

agementofchange; pro ject management and training.

6. ED - Europ ean Dynamics

Europ ean Dynamics ED is a leading Europ ean IT and Telecommunications systems integrator

headquartered in Athens, Greece. The company was established in November 1993 in Athens,

Greece with an ob jective to provide pro ducts and services in the elds of Information Technology

and Telecommunications IT&T.

The main activities of ED are telecommunication and information systems integration, soft-

ware and applications development, hardware and software distribution and technical supp ort,

facilities and applications management, and consulting services. ED O ers its services to organ-

isations in the public and private sectors, b oth in Greece and in 25 other countries world-wide.

These include government institutions, multinational corp orations and large companies, research

and academic institutes.

The company has a particular exp ertise in ASP, E-commerce B2C, B2B, B2E, etc., groupware

and work ow management developing its own software applications and to ols in these domains.

All E-commerce services that are develop ed by the E-commerce Division of ED, comprise Inter-

net / WWW solutions adjusted to business requirements and/ or customer needs prescrib ed in

advance, in co-op eration with our E-commerce exp erts. The company has know-how and skills to

integrate and provide solutions in various architectures and vendor platforms/pro ducts MS Site

Server, Intershop Mall, IBM WebSphere, Oracle ICS, etc. More sp eci cally, the E-commerce 11

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Division has develop ed signi cant know-how in Microsoft & Oracle databases as back-oce

platforms, C++ / CORBA / DCOM ob jects as middle-ware platforms, and Java/ASP as client

applications. All these exp ertise will b e brought to the U-INDFOR-ME pro ject.

Some of the most recent innovative e-commerce pro jects include the Konstantakatos Bros pro ject

that aims at developing an e-shop and also a corp orate p ortal for automating the communication

and information exchange of sta working at their di erent subsidiaries, the Sidenor/Sovel

pro ject that aims at developing Intranet applications to automate the op eration of provisioning

channels, supp orting corp orate database access and the exchange of customer orders invoices,

payment orders and shipping orders E-shops, an Electronic Mall http://eshops.eone.gr, where

e-shops of di erent retailers are b eing hosted and also an advanced eshop generation engine

op erates, automating the design, installation and maintenance of e-shops, customised to the

needs of the merchants, facilitating the advertising and selling of their pro ducts over the Internet,

and supp orting secure electronic payments of customers using credit cards, a corp orate p ortal

for UNILEVER HELLAS and nally an Internet p ortal for e-one http://www.eone.gr/ that

constitutes a global B2C concept, provides news, lifestyle, information, technical and business

information, etc., and supp orts classi eds and voting mechanisms, electronic directories, web-

mail and web-space facilities, discussion fora, journals, p olls and surveys, calendars, corp orate

news, do cument rep ositories, etc.

Additionally ED recently launched a pro ject for the development of an intelligent software

agent Legal Information Software Agent - LISA capable of supplying through the Internet

legal information ab out IPR Intellectual Prop erty Rights. EPI-SPARK pro ject nanced by

Europ ean Commission in the framework of IST-99 Programme will create an E-commerce site for

the provision of faster, cheap er and more comprehensive IPR services, principally for Europ ean

Small and Medium Enterprises. By the end of the pro ject in 2002, LISA system will b e capable

of handling for all EC countries, a 100

Techniques used for the development of LISA system are classi ed as follows:

 Information extraction and enco ding: a natural-language technology is adapted to facili-

tate extraction of sp eci c information from structured natural language text.

 Mechanisms for storing and accessing legal knowledge that is needed to answer IPR ques-

tions: existing legal ontology and deontic formalism representation of legal knowledge will

be employed and customised to match the sp eci c requirements of the IPR sector. This

will facilitate accurate retrieval of all, and only, relevant legal information that is necessary

to answer the queries subscrib ed to the system.

 Client DB and E-commerce infrastructure: Lisa must b e able to access information ab out

the client e.g. what information is already received, what existing IPR protection is

obtained, and for which designs/inventions, etc. All these e-commerce functionalities will

be implemented to supp ort LISA and the Information Extraction work, through a set of

intelligent agents develop ed using XML to ols and Java / servelet technologies.

 Network Infrastructure & Security: di erent techniques will b e employed to supp ort user

access control and registration, certi cation provision, secure transp ort proto cols, good

network connectivity, etc. 12

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Finally, ED e orts towards the development of new software agents facilitating the ecient

monitoring of control systems has led to launching of LIAISE pro ject, aiming to pro duce a com-

mercial to ol automating the negotiation and con guration of pro cess existing control systems.

The LIAISE system constitutes a multi-layer system, with eachlayer comprising a No de commu-

nicating with No des of other levels upp er or lower. Each actor within LIAISE system 'owns'

a copy of LIAISE-No de architecture. Users access the system through a central 'LIASE Portal'

and get assistance in prescribing their requirements into a formal request for quotations sub-

mitted to the system and forwarded to selected manufacturers. Each manufacturer contacted

will in turn try to satisfy the request and reply accordingly, while comp onents not supplied

by addressed manufacturers, are next requested from others in the list. The pro cess spreads

the computational e ort throughout the LIAISE environment, greatly increasing its sp eed and

exibility. Once manufacturers have provided their replies/o ers, the Liase-No de architecture

selects 'b est' solution and then passes information and control to an upp er level for taking nal

decisions. The resulting decision will b e an aggregation of 'b est solutions' that form a complete

prop osal to the User that triggered the system. The LIAISE system incorp orates arti cial in-

telligence in the form of rule-based and case-based reasoning. This allows, in theory, the system

to op erate completely without human intervention. The system describ ed ab ove makes up the

Op erational Layer, complimented by a Supp ort Layer providing the necessary data and other

utilities, such as registration, news and online assistance. Furthermore, an Infrastructure Layer

schedules and controls the op erations within the no des and system resources, guaranteeing that

none of system no des b ecomes overloaded. A scalable architecture is implemented to allow the

LIAISE environment grow and shrink dynamically. Six ma jor mo dules exist within the LIAISE

system architecture, supp orted by separate databases and rep ositories. The system is hosted

within a separate infrastructure layer, supp orting communication and scheduling. Finally, an

innovative negotiation pro cess is b eing implemented, allowing the LIAISE system to op erate

a cyclical negotiation system that enables manufacturers to improve their o ers against each

other. This provides the b est p ossible solution to the customer and greatly reduces the resp onse

time.

Key persons

 Nikitas Tsop elas, Business Group Manager

Dr. Nikitas Tsop elas: he has a PhD in Computer Science from Queen Mary College, Uni-

versity of London and a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical

UniversityofAthens. Dr Tsop elas is now leading the Electronic Commerce Section of EU-

ROPEAN DYNAMICS and under this capacity he sup ervises all the electronic pro jects of

the company. He has de ned the company strategy in this eld by sp ecifying the techno-

logical and business environment and develop ed the business by leading negotiations with

Greek industrial and commerce establishments.

 Elias Lizardos, Information Analyst

Mr Elias Lizardos holds an MSc in Computer Science and BSc in Computer Engineering,

b oth from George Washington University, USA. He is an outstanding electronic commerce

and catalogue services exp ert, and in EUROPEAN DYNAMICS, he has undertaken the

development of e-shops for customers using di erent commercial pro ducts.

 Ioannis Boutlas, Information Analyst 13

U-INFOR-ME February 21, 2001 Prop osal No: IST-2001-32011

Mr. Ioannis Boutlas holds and MSc. in Engineering Business Management from Warwick

University and a BEng. in Mechanical Engineering from Surrey University. He has an ex-

p ertise in Financial E-Commerce applications for the bank and sto ck brokerage industry

and an extensive pro ject management exp erience in innovative e-commerce frameworks

Europ ean Dynamic's XML framework, Europ ean Dynamic's Web Comp onent Environ-

ment framework etc. 14