Excerpt from IST Workprogramme 2001 - ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/ist/docs/b_wp_en_200101.pdf
 

Objectives

"The aim of this work is to improve the functionality, usability and acceptability of future information products and services, to enable linguistic and cultural diversity and contribute to the valorisation and exploitation of Europe's cultural patrimony, to stimulate creativity, and to enhance education and training systems for lifelong learning. Work will cover new models, methods, technologies and systems for creating, processing, managing, networking, accessing and exploiting digital content, including audio-visual content. An important research dimension will be new socio-economic and technological models for representing information, knowledge and know-how. The work will address both applications-oriented research, focusing on publishing, culture and education and training and generic research in language and content technologies for all applications areas, and will include validation, take-up, concertation and standards."

Strategy, Architecture and Focus

The rapid convergence of mobile communication, digital broadcasting and network infrastructures calls for rich multimedia content that is adaptive and responsive to the needs of European citizens, businesses and public organisations. Context based approaches to production, management and exchange of digital content, together with higher levels of interactivity, are a key feature of the ambient intelligence landscape and will enable more natural and effective use of the emerging universal infostructure.

In WP2001, Key Action III concentrates on the following inter-linked themes:

• Investigating paradigm shifts likely to affect multimedia content systems and services in the future, including next generation digital libraries and e-Learning.
• Promoting creativity in the content industries with a focus on content combining highly visual, audio and interactive media.
• Empowering the European workforce to adapt to rapidly changing skills profiles through novel personal training solutions.
• Enabling citizens and communities to create and access the digital records of their societies.
• Improving natural and user friendly interaction between humans and the universe of digital services, especially in non-expert, home and mobile environments.

The development and integration of cross media standards and metadata should accelerate the provision of digital content components and systems. Other enabling measures are foreseen to encourage co-ordination of research across disciplines in the domains addressed by the Key Action.

Key Action III aims at advancing IST integration and convergence by forging alliances between providers of digital content, online and mobile services, interactive and VR (virtual reality) technology, and a wide array of public and private users.

The diagram below summarises the actions foreseen under Workprogramme 2001:

Key Action III contributes to the eEurope Action Plan, in particular to Areas 4 - "European youth into the digital age" and 10 - "European digital content for global networks" , and the initiative "eLearning: Designing Tomorrow's Education". In this context, co-operation is planned with the content industries (including follow-up programmes to INFO2000 and MLIS, and the Internet Action Plan), audio-visual policy (including the MEDIA programmes), cultural initiatives (including CULTURE 2000), and education and training (including SOCRATES and LEONARDO).

The implementation strategy for this Key Action covers the full RTD cycle, combining take up, applications oriented research, generic research and development, and highly exploratory work on paradigm shifts in content, as illustrated in the table below.

RTD Priorities in 2001

A total of 11 Action Lines have been identified for the year 2001, including 9 RTD Action Lines, 1 Take-up Measure and 1 Action Line for specific Support Measures.
 

Overview of 2001 Action Lines	Action Line no IST 2001	Action Line Title
Interactive publishing, digital content and cultural heritage	III.1.1 III.1.2 III.1.3	Publishing digital content  Heritage for all Next generation digital collections
Education and training	III.2.1 III.2.2	Self learning for work e-Learning futures
Human language technologies	III.3.1 III.3.2	Multilingual Web Natural and multilingual interactivity
Information access, filtering, analysis and handling	III.4.1	Semantic Web technologies
Spanning actions	III.5.1 III.5.2 III.5.3	x-Content futures  Competence building  KA III specific support measures

 

Action Line Descriptions

III.1 Interactive publishing, digital content and cultural heritage

New and emerging technologies are exerting significant pressures on the traditional publishing supply chain. Novel forms of content including textual, audio-visual, 3-D, Virtual Reality, and rich-context, call for new approaches to authoring, management and delivery across such platforms as interactive TV, broadband Internet, mobile Internet devices, (e.g. WAP, GPRS, UMTS), e-books, etc. Technological advances and the subsequent convergence towards stable platforms and standards are providing vast opportunities for innovative tools and services associated with the publication of digital content.

In the cultural area, the objective is to develop shared visions, to make globally visible the rich diversity of European cultural heritage content, and to foster the emergence of inclusive and sustainable cultural and scientific collections and related services, in partnership with relevant local and regional organisations.

IST2001 - III.1.1 Publishing digital content

Objectives: To develop, validate and benchmark new methods, services and tools to facilitate authoring, management, production and delivery of digital content appropriate to the broadcasting, entertainment, advertising, publishing and new emerging media sectors.

Focus:

Research is invited in the areas of new audio-visual services, systems and tools, and of cross-media publishing, covering the following issues:

• Interactive authoring, editing and delivery to multiple platforms, including interactive TV, broadband Internet appliances, mobile Internet devices and e-books;
• Content management tools associated with heterogeneous multimedia databases, multi-platform and cross-media publishing and digital content security and protection issues;
• New paradigms and business models supporting the e-publishing value chain in areas such as advertising, virtual communities and personalised services;
• E-production workflow, for seamless integration of interactive and collaborative authoring, production and delivery, including tracking and measurement of user behaviour and delivery informed authoring and production tools.

Types of actions addressed: Research and Development, Demonstration, Combined projects, Trials, Thematic Networks
Links with WP2000: Re-focussed Action Line IST 2000 - III.1.1.
 

IST2001 - III.1.2 Heritage for all

Objectives: To foster sustainable online communities in creating and documenting the digital record of their societies, including safeguarding its accessibility for the future.

Focus:

• Innovative experiments in creating, manipulating or aggregating local resources and making them sustainable, visible and valid in the global context;
• Digital archiving applications integrating discovery technologies and tools, to provide easy access to the evolving digital record of the peoples of Europe at different levels of complexity and detail;
• Tools and services which guarantee equality of opportunity and quality of discovery service and resource, in support of social and cultural inclusiveness.

Types of actions addressed: Research and Development, Demonstration, Combined projects, Thematic Networks
Links with WP2000: New Action Line with medium term/medium risk
 

IST2001 - III.1.3 Next generation digital collections

Objectives: To improve substantially, both qualitatively and quantitatively, access for citizens and professionals to Europe's expanding repositories of cultural and scientific knowledge.

Focus:

• Advanced digital library applications built on very large scale distributed collections;
• Innovative systems delivering adaptive and intelligent scientific and cultural content, integrating new economic, business and navigational models, sustainable over time;
• Virtual heritage: visualisation and VR as new tools/methods for representation and navigation (e.g. of objects, collections and landscapes).

Types of actions addressed: Research and Development, Demonstration, Combined projects, Thematic Networks
Links with WP2000: Consolidation of Action Lines IST 2000 - III.1.4 and III.1.6 extended to long term/medium risk work on next generation digital library issues.
 

III.2 Education and training

Actions in this area support improvements to the process of learning through the use of ICT. This year work focuses on the trend towards greater individual control and responsibility for training, and on the need to encourage more radical thinking as to how ICT can lead to real paradigm shifts in the way we learn.
 

IST2001 - III.2.1 Self learning for work

Objectives: To empower individuals to define, procure and manage their learning for work, in response to rapidly changing organisational, business and employment needs. Enabling continuous interaction between theory and practice, the ICT supported solutions will be based upon sound pedagogical models and will be fully integrated into the user's environment. The research will evaluate the added value of the new way of learning and its socio-economic impact, demonstrating the benefits for the various actors (learner, tutor, sponsor, etc). Projects are expected to lead to new sustainable business models involving universities, training colleges, professional bodies, corporations, Chambers of Commerce, trade unions, training brokers, etc.

Focus:

Research must address one or more of the following key topics:

• Learner models - flexible, personal models for learning. Supporting automated learner profiling, identification of key competencies and skills gap analysis, personal learning goals definition, individual learning styles, continuous guidance and motivation, self assessment, etc.
• Soft skills and informal learning - supporting the learner to develop soft skills (inter-personal communication, team work, leadership, project management, etc) through the sharing of knowledge, dynamic learning content generation, modelling and representation of domain knowledge for learning, etc.
• Communities of learning - support for the identification and implementation of virtual communities, involving individuals with similar learning needs, within and across organisational boundaries. Work should support user friendly social interaction for group problem solving, knowledge sharing, mentoring, learner-tutor communication, etc.
• Personal intellectual capital - developing electronic CVs to facilitate the recognition and certification of experience by 3^rd parties and the transfer of learning profiles across jobs and careers, etc.

Links with 2000 WP: New Action Line, with links to Action Line IST 2000 - III.2.2 "The Learning Citizen"
 

IST2001 - III.2.2 e-Learning futures

Objectives: Experimental, longer term research providing significant contributions to insight into next generation e-Learning systems and services, leading to enhancement of human learning and cognitive processes. Envisaged enhancements should respond to anticipated future needs of individual learners. The research should contribute to an overall advancement of the state of the art of learning technologies and their impact as a long term goal and should help to build and sustain a corresponding multidisciplinary research community at a European level through appropriate Accompanying Measures, Networks of Excellence and workshops.

Focus: Intended as longer term research, well beyond the state of the art, for initial and adult learning. Proposals should specify:

• The intended learning aims and the associated theoretical basis, and how they relate to the prevailing and expected future social and economic realities;
• The rationale for the problems or opportunities identified, in terms of relevance and context from a learning perspective;
• The innovative and unique nature of the research proposed;
• The methodology for achieving the operational aims, including the underlying ICT environment needed and its characteristics.

Types of actions addressed: Research and Development, Demonstration, Combined projects, Thematic Networks
Links with WP2000: New Action Line

III.3 Human language technologies (HLT)

The overall objective of HLT is to support e-business in a global context and to promote a human centred infostructure ensuring equal access and usage opportunities for all. This is to be achieved by developing multilingual technologies and demonstrating exemplary applications providing functionalities that are critical for the realisation of a truly user friendly Information Society. Projects will address generic and applied RTD from a multi- and cross-lingual perspective, and will undertake to demonstrate how language specific solutions can be transferred to and adapted for other languages.
 

IST2001 - III.3.1 Multilingual Web

Objectives: To advance towards a fuller realisation of the multilingual Internet for personal development and informational purposes, and for distributed enterprise knowledge management across languages and delivery platforms.

Focus:

Wider availability and more effective production and use of multilingual information over fixed and mobile digital networks. RTD work will address both integrative showcases and longer-term research endeavours with identifiable short term spin offs, and will encompass three intertwined project lines:

• Collaborative multi-language design, authoring and publishing of online (Web) multimedia documents, including controlled language techniques and cross-lingual terminology support, and the associated need to preserve quality and consistency across parallel language versions through integrated workflow, quality control and update management tools;
• Automated translation of written and spoken language, multilingual generation and cross-lingual gathering and abstracting of online (Web) content, including customised solutions for vertical markets, corporate intranets, and e-Commerce applications;
• Adaptative information delivery through multi-channel services (text, speech, multimodal content and input-output) together with the associated information selection, conversion and rendering according to user preferences (from gisting through summarisation to full translation) and the capabilities of the access point (e.g. Internet PC browser, GPRS/UMTS micro-browser, fixed or mobile telephone).

Types of actions addressed: Research and Development, Demonstration, Combined projects
Links with WP2000: This action line is a re-focused version of IST 2000 III.3.2, and is geared towards multilingual Web content, translation and cross-media delivery.
 

IST2001 - III.3.2 Natural and multilingual interactivity

Objectives: To progress towards a more intuitive interaction with, and effective use of intelligent network services and appliances. RTD will address both relatively short term applicative showcases and longer term research efforts aimed at robust dialogue and unconstrained speech/language understanding. The intended orientation towards middleware and embedded technologies presupposes significant advances of the component technologies and further progress towards their integration within mass market products and services.

Focus:

RTD will focus on the intersection of multilingual input/output with speech-, language- and multimodal interaction and technology mediated communication, and address service issues such as performance, reliability and scalability of embedded speech and language technologies. RTD work will encompass:

• At home: interaction with network enabled information and entertainment appliances, and command and control of complex home services and appliances, including reliable speech recognition and high quality synthesis in demanding environments and for user groups with special needs (e.g. children and non-native speakers).
• At work: technology assisted interpersonal and group communication, including virtual meetings and multilingual dialogues e.g. for conversational customer support services.
• On the move: interaction with and control of personal information and communication appliances, including next-generation mobiles and digital assistants, on-board devices and in-vehicle services.

III.4 Information access, filtering, analysis and handling (IAF)

The World Wide Web is becoming a major vehicle for the distribution and delivery of multimedia content including video and audio, accessible from stationary (including domestic) and mobile platforms. It is, however, necessary to impose more semantic structure on Web content in order to facilitate, for example, resource and knowledge discovery, information filtering and intelligent browsing. It is, in short, necessary to make Web content machine understandable. Given the sheer size and dynamics of the Web this can only be achieved through highly automated procedures.
 

IST2001 - III.4.1 Semantic Web technologies

Objectives: To enable users to access, retrieve and filter information from the Web, relevant to their interests and needs, and matching their quality expectations. This requires new and advanced methods, models, tools and systems for services related to access, retrieval and filtering of Web-based content, in particular the development of new search systems and machines, in line with existing and emerging relevant standards. These services would typically be provided by intelligent agents.

Focus:

This Action Line focuses on content technologies that contribute to the creation and exploitation of the Semantic Web. It invites projects that develop, apply and benchmark these technologies in a Web context. They include:

• Methods and tools for coding and structuring digital content, for defining and declaring its semantics. These would typically employ XML, RDF and other techniques for semantic interoperability and reasoning such as ontologies for domain specific applications.
• Methods and tools for the derivation of semantic attributes of Web-based content (in particular video, audio and images) through, for example,. automatic feature detection, video segmentation and post-processing. This would facilitate multimedia indexing based on content analysis as well as automated categorization of Web resources.
• Semantics based tools for knowledge discovery and intelligent filtering and profiling such as information agents and specific query languages. Semantics based tools for collaborative filtering and knowledge sharing in specific or general user communities.
• Information visualisation: intelligent and visual interfaces which take advantage of semantic information structures to provide users with radical new ways to navigate and search naturally through unknown and complex information spaces.

Types of Actions addressed: Research and Development, Demonstration, Combined projects, Thematic Networks

Links with WP2000: New Action Line
 

III.5 Spanning Actions
 

IST2001 - III.5.1 x-Content futures

Objectives: To provide opportunities for high payoff breakthrough research within the scope of the Key Action, yet with a focus on issues not covered at present by its Action Lines.

Focus:

The research will anticipate future developments, explore radically new concepts and paradigms, and address important problems currently impeding progress in the area of multimedia contents and tools, against a 10 year horizon.

Types of Actions addressed: Research and Development (ranging from proof of concept to full-scale R&D)
Links with WP2000: New Action Line.
 

IST2001 - III.5.2 Competence building

• Acquisition of multimedia skills: user trials of advanced multimedia learning solutions to address the current shortage of trained IT professionals for multimedia in Europe including through international co-operation. Projects will demonstrate and evaluate the added value of their innovative solutions which can cover any of the key stages in multimedia production.

• Access to competence in multimedia: provide access to advanced emerging technologies and services, knowledge and competence relevant to multimedia systems and services, via world class competence centres already existing or emerging in Europe. A common objective is to benchmark developments and the adoption of new technologies in the domains targeted. Such centres should be able to demonstrate leadership qualities in their respective domains of competence. The sustainability of such services must be established based upon well articulated requirements and convincing business models.

IST2001 - III.5.3 KA III specific support measures

• Surveying the state of the art in the fields addressed by the Key Action, including technology foresight and market watch. This can be combined with benchmarking of research results and progress towards strategic goals, based on a (small) set of performance indicators measuring quality, effectiveness and impact along technical, economic and social dimensions. The work also covers surveys of the position of European research in this area with respect to similar efforts carried out under national or industrial projects or in competitor countries.
• Identification, documentation and dissemination of knowhow, in the design, implementation and use of systems, tools and methods addressed by the Key Action. Projects will actively seek out results emerging from user trials (EU funded or otherwise), analyse strengths and weaknesses, disseminate conclusions and foster their deployment in other European programmes, national or regional initiatives including those supported by Structural Funds. In the case of de facto standards, emphasis will be on channelling them through relevant international and professional bodies.
• Evaluation of advanced multimedia products and applications through open competitions and/or award schemes, with a view to establishing excellence in a variety of categories, based on innovation, creativity and other criteria. This action is expected to give rise to highly visible showcases, for exemplification and illustration.

Types of Actions addressed: Accompanying Measures (excluding Take-up).
Links with WP2000: Re-focussed Action Line IST 2000 III.5.1, complementing those available under the Continuous Submission Scheme.