Dear VE-Forum User,

This special edition of the VE-Forum Newsletter is brought to you by the unit "ICT for Enterprise Networking" of Directorate General "Information Society and Media" of the European Commission in co-operation with the VE-Forum Team.

Editorial by Gérald Santucci - Head of the Enterprise Networking Unit

Sometimes I find myself visualising a unit as though it was a big vineyard. Think of a “cluster” in terms of a grape harvest. Everyone knows that wine comes from grapes, but not just any grapes. The best vintages are a mixture of grape varieties added each for their own distinctive contribution to the overall flavour. Clustered projects can yield the same quality harvest by taking individual projects and grouping them to produce potentially higher volume, but definitely an enhanced richness in the final product.

Above and beyond this, it’s been a volatile world for the past two or three years as the pervasive influence of advanced ICT has brought a fundamental reshaping of the global industry, with e-business solutions and the associated legal and policy environment becoming an enabler, and even a transformer of business and industry towards integration, networking, and convergence.

There’s no doubt we need leadership and commitment in both research and take-up to match the pace of change around us. But what we especially necessitate is to be together to deal with the uncertainty and the complexity, and to feel confident in the domain’s and each cluster’s direction. That’s a job that is never finished. >Read more...
  

Parallel to the revision of the Lisbon Strategy and to the forthcoming closure of the eEurope 2005 Action Plan, the European Commission published a five-year strategy to boost the digital economy called “i2010 - A European Information Society for growth and employment.” Under the objective to strengthen Innovation and Investment in ICT research lies the aspiration of promoting growth and employment, in line with the Lisbon targets.

Several action lines presented by this document are intimately related to the mission of our clusters and should become our priority for the next years, like focusing on strategic ICT research topics for Enterprise Networking or collaborating with the Commission to the making of e-Business policies.

For the mutual benefit of both sides, the Commission should participate to the definition of priorities for the clusters and align its policy activities in the area of Enterprise Networking with these. At a later stage, each cluster should have its own roadmap summing up expectations and achievements serving as a basis for policy development. >Read more...

>Link to i2010 Vision Document

Ambient Intelligence Technologies for the Product Life-Cycle

Ambient Intelligent Technologies in a networked world will change dramatically the way goods are produced and services will be delivered. Despite the fact that a lot of separate elements for this vision have been already developed, a lot of efforts have still to be made to integrate them in a larger scale and to retrieve substantial benefits. Research challenges lay in the fields of frameworks (business, process, and service methodologies and models), development and governance approaches of intelligent and networked products, smart objects identification and wireless radio frequency technologies (RFID), and secure and trusted communication. Some eight research projects and more probably soon contribute to bring this vision alive. >Read more...

Business Networking

The cluster "Business Networking: reference models and technologies" groups together several projects funded within the 6th Framework Programme. The number of participating projects is due to increase shortly, with the arrival of new projects funded under successive Calls, which will contribute to the creation of a critical mass.
This cluster aims to design, develop and demonstrate reference models – as well as the supporting technologies – for agile, virtual organisations in order to allow the exploitation of new business potential, foster innovation, and increase their knowledge through enhanced collaboration, while also implementing policy initiatives (e.g. the project MYCAREVENT).
The strategy devised to achieve this goal is to take advantage of the synergy of the various projects, active in different domains and to share their results, therefore boosting the potential to devise cross-domain methods and solutions of more universal application. >Read more...

Please find below the announcement of a competitive call for additional contractors for the project ECOLEAD.

Digital Ecosystems

The Digital Business Ecosystem concept is emerging worldwide as the innovative approach for the supporting the adoption and development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The Digital Ecosystem concept, which initially appeared in Europe in 2002, aims at implementing the ambitious objectives set at Lisbon Council: higher growth, more and better jobs and greater social inclusion, keeping in mind the peculiarities of the European development, mostly based on a diffused network of SMEs and on local innovation systems.

Today, the concept of "Digital Ecosystems" has been worldwide adopted, although under different interpretations. The European vision of Digital Ecosystems is becoming mature and has developed a long-term vision and an evolution strategy, which has been included as one of the goals of the i2010 local agendas.

The ecosystem paradigm allows to deliver intermediate results, but at the same time to continue to evolve toward the long-term vision. Therefore, in three years of activities, the digital ecosystem cluster has already reached several relevant achievements. The first rudimental ecosystems are already running within the pilot regions which have joined the initiative. The first software components, developed by the large Integrated Project: DBE, are already available and are being tested by innovative SMEs and open-source developers. New formalisms have been developed. A research agenda for the year 2010 has been defined.

For knowing more about digital ecosystems please visit the digital ecosystem site or subscribe to digital ecosystem RSS newsfeed.

Enterprise Interoperability

Enterprises are increasingly cooperating with other enterprises. Not only large organisations set up cooperation agreements with other enterprises, but also SMEs are combining forces to compete jointly in the market. Nowadays, an enterprise’s competitiveness is largely determined by its ability to seamlessly interoperate with others. Various actions need to be taken and various research challenges need to be tackled to enable seamless interoperation between enterprises. Enterprise interoperability needs to be addressed from organisational, semantic, and technical point of view. A number of ongoing research initiatives contribute to improving enterprise interoperability. >Read more...
 

SATINE

The tourism industry today is the second largest economic sector, after manufacturing in the world. Earlier than in other sectors, tourism embarked on e-Business, not only with respect to B2B, but also to B2C. The current players in the travel industry include many airline companies, big hotel and rent-a-car chains. However, small and medium-sized enterprises, for example "bed and breakfast" accommodations cannot participate in this picture.

The SATINE project realized a semantic interoperability infrastructure to address the problems mentioned for tourism industry and providing an easy to use tool and service connections for small and middle enterprises in the tourist sector to participate in an e-Business web.>Read more...

INTEROP

The First International Conference on Interoperability of Enterprise Software and Applications (INTEROP-ESA’2005) was held in Geneva, Switzerland, 23-25 February 2005. Organised by the INTEROP Network of Excellence, the conference was hosted by the University of Geneva. The conference attracted a total of 85 full paper submissions. After the review process the programme committee finally retained 38 papers for the final programme. 35 papers were accepted for the main scientific conference and 3 papers for the industrial track. 146 participants from industry and academia from 23 countries around the world attended the conference. Of these participants, 139 were from Europe, 3 from North and South America, and 4 from Asia.>Read more...
 

Launched at the Lisbon European Council in March 2000, the creation of a European Research Area (ERA) has become the central pillar of EU activities in the field of research and the reference framework for European research policy issues.

Within the current Framework Programme a strong emphasis was given on new instruments to structure research efforts and overcome fragmentation. The 7th Framework Programme will put even more emphasis on selected research themes and the combination of different funding mechanisms in areas where the EU should reinforce and better exploit its knowledge base.

The clusters contribute to the selection of specific research topics by examining a limited set of key topics in their domain and by reinforcing their network with different partners and contact persons on European/national/regional level. >Read more...

Commission Communication - Building the ERA of Knowledge for Growth
ERA official documents list: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/era/listcom_en.html
 

The clusters will move ahead to execute their agendas, in particular gaining visibility and reinforcing co-operation of projects at cluster level. Projects to be retained for funding from call 5 of the FP6 will already more specifically address research topics in the advent of FP7 (e.g. smart objects and intelligent products). Moreover, the next Framework Programme will be accompanied by the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) which will, for example, support networks that help SMEs to participate in the Research Framework Programme, and fund a Business Innovation Support Scheme.

As we said in the beginning the job in the Enterprise Networking area will never be finished. We are looking forward to sharing your visions with you and receiving your dedicated feedback.

Contact
Gérald Santucci (Head of Unit)
gerald.santucci@cec.eu.int
 

Competitive call for additional contractors
European collaborative network initiative calls for partners

The IST project ECOLEAD opens a competitive call for additional contractors, with the aim of finding new partners willing to be engaged in piloting activities relevant to the ECOLEAD project results. ECOLEAD, European collaborative networked organisations leadership initiative, aims to create strong foundations and mechanisms needed to establish the most advanced collaborative and network-based industry society in Europe. The call is focused on end-users of collaborative network solutions, such as organisations managing SME enterprise networks, virtual organisations or professional virtual communities. The selected organisations will join the ECOLEAD consortium as full new partners, with the main objectives to create a set of illustrative successful cases to support the impact creation and the increase of awareness of collaborative networked organisations solutions, to discover approaches and methodologies for the successful use of the ECOLEAD results, and to support the road-mapping by giving feedback about the effectiveness of ECOLEAD results and by identification of further challenges. The call closes on 13 October 2005.>Read more...