Fp7: Energy (Finland)

FP7 Environment / Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (Switzerland 16.02.)

Funding Source/Programme

Regarding FP7 Environment our main interest is within sub-activity 6.4.2. Forecasting methods and assessment tools for sustainable development (especially tools for social impact assessment, sustainable development indicators, promotion of sustainable consumption patterns and engaging civil society).

However in FP7 Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities some activities will also deal with sustainability indicators.

Project Objectives & Programme Criteria

The Institute for Sustainable Development at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ine-ZHW), Switzerland, is interested in contributing to the development of a European research project proposal as a partner with our expertise in general issues of sustainable development at different levels, with our experiences (from previous European and national projects) in the development and application of indicator and foresight tools as well as of sustainable impact assessment tools (especially regarding social aspects) and with our ultimate goal of reaching a more sustainable society. A wide variety of research methods is available within our institute for the development of concepts, models, strategies and evaluation processes supporting sustainable development in three main research areas: sustainable regional development, sustainable corporate development as well as sustainability and emerging economies. (E-learning) courses in sustainability issues will support the transfer of research results into education. GIS-knowledge can be implemented where requested.

Contact

We ask you kindly to contact us, if you are planning or aware of any proposal in the mentioned areas, where our contribution as Swiss research partner is welcomed. More information about ine-ZHW is available on request.

Vicente Carabias-Hütter, dipl. Natw. ETH
Zürcher Hochschule Winterthur (ZHW)
Institut für Nachhaltige Entwicklung
Briefadresse: Postfach 805, CH - 8401 Winterthur
Paketadresse: Technopark, Jägerstr.2, CH - 8406 Winterthur
Switzerland

Tel.: [phone]

Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
www.ine.zhwin.ch
www.socialmanagement.ch

FP7: Intelligent Content & Semantics (Italy, 16.02.)

Funding Source/Programme

FP7: ICT-2007.4.2 (ICT-2007.4.4): Intelligent Content and Semantics / STREP

Project Objectives & Programme Criteria

Target either:

f) Advanced knowledge management systems for information-bound organisations and communities, capable of extracting actionable meaning from structured and unstructured information and social interaction patterns, and of making it available for activities ranging from information search through conceptual mapping to decision making. Such systems will exploit semantics embedded in multimedia objects, data streams and ICT-based processes, and rely on formal policies to manage user access as well as audit trails in support of dynamic virtual organisations. Research advances will be embedded within end-to-end systems using computer-tractable knowledge in support of dynamic data and application integration, automation and interoperation of business processes, automated diagnosis and problem-solving in a variety of domains. Robustness, scalability and flexibility will be tested in real-life settings, together with interworking with legacy systems.

Or
c) Architectures and technologies for personalised distribution, presentation and consumption of self-aware, adaptive content. Detecting and exploiting emergent ambient intelligence they will use features embedded in content objects and rendering equipment to enable dynamic device adaptation, immersive multimodal experiences and contextual support of user goals and linguistic preferences. Privacy preserving learning algorithms will analyse user interactions with devices and other users so as to update and effectively serve those goals and preferences.

Expected impact:

These activities will make digital resources that embody creativity and semantics easier and more cost-effective to produce, organize, search, personalise, distribute and (re)use, across the value chain.

Creators will be able to design more participative and communicative forms of content.
Publishers in creative industries, enterprises and professional sectors will increase their productivity with innovative content of greater complexity and ease of repurposing.
Organisations will be able to automate the collection and distribution of digital content and machine-tractable knowledge and share them with partner organisations in trusted collaborative environments.
Scientists will operate more efficiently by automating the link between data analysis, theory and experimental validation.

Core activities/work packages

We believe that the key to the above mentioned problem lies in endowing the content implicitly contained in administrative and government web sites with richer semantic characterisation.
For an effective participation of citizens to democratic governance, it is thus vital to produce content-enhanced digital material that satisfies the following requirements:
a) is dynamically adaptive, according to user profiles;
b) is categorised according to multiple dimensions, thus allowing both for being searched along different perspectives and being differently delivered according to the particular type of user requesting for it;
c) is semantically interconnected, with concepts tightly related one to the other;
d) is language-related, i.e. expressions in natural language are related to concepts and vice-versa, allowing a concept to be expressed with the different variants that realise it in natural language, both cross-linguistically and transversally as to the societal variations;
e) is user-sensitive, i.e. is tagged and categorised according to tags and categories that make sense to users themselves. This will help building ways of information display and presentation that incorporate users’ view over content.

To this end, the project we want to propose intends to show the effectiveness of the envisaged approach to content enrichment by means of a dedicated search engine that will allow different categories of users to perform searches over a PA documental base. A user profiling facility will be provided allowing users to tune the search engine according to a set of preferences, e.g. language, profession, interests, etc. (a). The documents in the documental base will be tagged according to multiple dimensions of meaning, also exploiting the rich semantic information already available in semantic repositories of some of the partners (b). Moreover, by virtue of being linked to semantic repositories, the tags associated with web sites content can also allow for semantic searches, meaning that semantically-related concepts can also be queried and retrieved (c). The documental base will be constituted by documents provided by institutions and Public Administrations. However, this documental base will be tagged and categorized not only “top-down” (i.e., by PA content managers), as it is the usual case. Users of web sites will be provided with facilities of adding their own tagging to content, which will be then harmonized with and incorporated into the one already available, so that to effectively build a “tagging cycle” that aims at taking into account users’ views and perception of content (e). Finally, the search and tagging facilities will be provided in such a way as to allow users’ expression in natural language, also taking multilinguality into account (d).

Scientific objectives addressed:
• To elaborate novel ways of enriching content, with the help of rich repositories of knowledge;
• To provide content in administrative and government web sites with multi-faceted semantic tags;
• To envisage novel ways of organising knowledge, that re-adapts according to users’ feedback;
• to explore ways of iteratively feeding back this information into the categorization systems, so that content can get dynamically changed over time, according to users’ perception and feedback.
Societal needs addressed:
• Short term: to practically show the extent to which knowledge-enhanced web sites can improve their usability;
• Longer term: to reinforce democratic processes, in order to improve transparency, accessibility, access to content, and knowledge sharing.

Technological objectives addressed:

…

Foreseen activities:

• User needs analysis and review of current ways of organising and categorising content
• Definition of an exemplary set of users (for ex., a given professional or working category, …) and use cases
• Definition of a set of web sites on which to perform the experiment (test set) – to be provided by PAs participating to the project
• Definition of the type of information/content/semantic tags to be associated with actual content (this implies study and/or customisation of appropriate ontologies)
• Enrichment of content with the specified semantic tags, also by means of NLP and knowledge extraction techniques (how will this be done? Online/offline? Will the project provide the web site managers with tools/system to tag content or will this be performed the other way round?)
• Linking of semantic tags to semantic/knowledge bases
• Showcase: use of a search engine to perform searches according to tags
• Evaluation