3rd Balkan Conference in Informatics (BCI

1
NESSI and SIRMA

• 3rd Balkan Conference in Informatics (BCI2007)
• 27-29 September 2007, Sofia, Bulgaria
• Vladimir Alexiev, PhD
• CTO Sirma Solutions

2
Who is Sirma Group

• The largest Bulgarian-ownedsoftware company
• Established in 1992, 15 years of successful
  growth
• 250 staff, huge technology pool
• Own new office (built 2002)
• 15 Business units, including product companies,
  banking software, international IT consulting,
  system integration and outsourcing units

3
Who is Ontotext

• Ontotext is a research lab of Sirma Group and
  worldwide-leading developer of core semantic
  technology. Research areas Ontology Management
  Information Extraction and Retrieval (IE, IR)
  Semantic Web Services. Application domains Web
  Mining, EAI, KM, BI, and Media Research.
• Ontotext is active in leading-edge semantic
  research, but unlike a typical research
  organization, it also embodies research results
  in production-quality software products. Ontotext
  is the developer of several outstanding products
  and major contributor to open-source platforms
• KIM Platform semantic search engine, using text
  analysis to provide hybrid queries involving
  structured data and inference.
• WSMO Studio semantic web services (SWS) modeling
  environment.
• OWLIM industrial-scale semantic database, using
  Semantic Web standards for inference and
  integration/consolidation of heterogeneous data.
• Wsmo4jAPI and a reference implementation for
  building SWS.
• PROTON light-weight general-purpose upper-level
  ontology defining about 300 classes and 100
  properties.
• ORDI Ontology Representation and Data
  Integration middleware, integrated with wsmo4j.

4
Ontotext and EU IST
Bulgarias most successful participant in EU IST
projects under the EU Framework Programs.

• Projects completed under FP5
• On-To-Knowledge, inventor of OIL,
  www.ontoknowledge.org Ontology Middleware Module
  and DAMLOIL reasoner
• VISION, Towards Next Generation Knowledge
  Management, km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/fzi/vision/
• OntoWeb, Ontology-based information exchange,
  www.ontoweb.org. Applications to (knowledge
  management and electronic commerce),
• SWWS, Semantic Web enabled Web Services,
  swws.semanticweb.org.Comprehensive Web Service
  description framework Web Service discovery
  scalable Web Services mediation platform
• Other completed projects
• COG, Corporate Ontology Grid, www.cogproject.org.
  Commercial applications of grid technology via
  ontological modeling to integrate corporate
  information.
• GATE, General Architecture for Text Engineering,
  www.gate.ac.uk
• SWAN, Semantic Web Annotator, deri.ie/projects/swa
  n.Large Scale Annotation of human language for
  the Semantic Web

5
Ontotext and EU IST

• Projects completed under FP6
• SEKT, Semantic Knowledge Technologies,
  sekt.semanticweb.org.Targeting a synergy of
  Ontology and Metadata Technology, Knowledge
  Discovery and Human Language Technology.
• DIP, Data, Information, and Process Integration
  with Semantic Web Services, informatik.uibk.ac.at/
  infweb/meetings/dip
• InfraWebs, www.infrawebs.org, Intelligent
  Framework for Networked Businesses and
  Governments Using Semantic Web Services (SWS) and
  Multi-Agent-Systems

6
Ontotext and EU IST

• Ongoing FP6 projects
• PrestoSpace, Preservation towards storage and
  access. www.prestospace.org.
• IST World, Knowledge Base for RTD competencies in
  IST, ist-world.dfki.de
• SUPER, Semantics Utilised for Process management
  within and between EnteRprises, www.ip-super.org
• RASCALLI, Responsive Artificial Situated
  Cognitive Agents Living and Learning on the
  Internet, www.ofai.at/rascalli.
• SemanticGov, Providing Integrated Public Services
  to Citizens at the National and Pan-European
  level with the use of Emerging Semantic Web
  Technologies.
• TAO, Transitioning Applications to Ontologies.
  How can existing 'legacy' applications migrate to
  open, semantic-based SOA.
• TripCom, Triple Space Communication.
• MediaCampaign, Discovering, inter-relating and
  navigating cross-media campaign knowledge.
• The total budget of these projects exceeds 90M
  EUR. Ontotext has won several FP7 projects as well

7
Sirma and NESSI

• Sirma joined NESSI in 2006.
• The initiative came from Sirma Solutionsa unit
  that works on large projects for eGovernment,
  private companies, outsourcing.
• The idea was to intensify EU-funded research in
  more practically-oriented areas, such as
  efficient implementation of large e-Government
  systems, improving software engineering
  practices, etc.

• Sirma is a member of the following working
  groups
• Software Engineering
• Project Management, Requirements Engineering,
  Quality Assurance subgroup
• Semantic Technologies
• Business Process Management
• Small and Medium Enterprises
• Ontotext has already collaborated on EU FP
  projects with leading software vendors that
  participate in these working groups, such as IBM,
  SAP, Atos Origin, IDS Scheer. Weve had very
  close collaborations with the leading members of
  the Semantic work-group.

8
Impact of NESSI

• Unfortunately, so far NESSI has had no impact on
  Sirmas work and EU projects.
• All of our collaborations were established before
  or independently of NESSI.
• We have not participated in FP7 proposals
  initiated by NESSI.
• In our view
• NESSI pursues a worthwhile research and
  application-oriented agenda (NESSI SRA and
  NEXOF).
• A number of work-groups are established, but the
  level of activity is low.
• The potential for collaboration is huge but not
  realized yet.
• Some very capable SMEs are NESSI members, but
  their capacities are under-utilized.