| Participant short name: | ILRT | W3C-ERCIM | CCLRC | HP | STILO |
| Participant number: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Person-months per participant: | 14 | 25 | 0 | 9 | 7.4 |
The project will produce results of interest to a number of groups. It will also have a key part to play in fostering information exchange between existing research and development communities, both regarding the SWAD-Europe project and how existing work can inform the project's activities. Education and Outreach forms a major theme of this project; in addition to work budgeted within this workpackage, effort is allocated through the workplan to produce demonstrators, sample code, research prototypes and other supporting materials. Specific areas of work in this project are described below.
Note that the basic technical/content framework for much of the project, and in particular WP3, is established by the Technical and Scientific Coordination package, WP2. In particular see WP3 for description of Advisory Group, establishment of standards liaison (W3C and other), and stakeholder communities.
A project web presence will be designed and implemented during the first months of the project, with more content added as the project develops. This public web site will provide an information point for the work of the project itself (including details of partners, objectives, work areas, results, interim results and working papers, public deliverables, etc.) and for related fields of work (links to other projects, services, collaborative efforts, etc., relevant to each part of the project). The public web site will be one of the main channels for wider public information dissemination and may contain some of the information also available on the partners' site, subject to partners' agreement. The website will have persistent URLs. The public web site will provide the first testing ground for relevant tools and technologies created within the project.
The project will provide a public webspace which partners and outside collaborators can use to work together and as a place to work on and put software and demonstrators. This will make it available to the entire European Community to leverage as fast as possible, at the same time establishing the leading position of Europe in making this code and documentation available internationally. A publicly accessible source code server will be provided to host developed software, probably using CVS or a compatible server. Community members will be invited to contribute code to the repository using the Open Source model, as well as consortium members. The source code server will be publicly readable to all.
The project will use existing email lists and other foci for community discussion to encourage community effort and collaborative working between project participants and members of the wider community in the areas described in workpackages 4-15. Examples of areas to concentrate effort in include the RDF Interest Group mailing list and its very successful IRC channel; the rdf-logic list; the newly-formed RDF Rules and Query mailing list; and local initiatives such as the UK-based semanticweb-southwest mailing list. This approach will create the best possible value for money for the EU, as well as exploiting and enabling the active and creative international Semantic Web community. It will involve being active in the community using IRC channels, email lists, workshops and conferences, and playing an enabling role for individuals and groups to get together by improving communication through these channels.
The plan will conform to the requirements of the 'Dissemination and Use plan' as defined in Appendix 3 of the Guidelines for Contract Preparation (Ref. No. b_gcp_en_200001)
A major theme of this project is to describe current best practice or usual practice in each area investigated. Documents created in the project whihc do this will be made public and given permanent URLs linked from the project website, and promoted to the wider community using mailing lists and discussion fora. Reporting on best practice means that the partners will undertake to write up (or where appropriate encourage others to write up) areas of the technology which seem neglected or that will be useful to this project or any other project working in this area. Examples might include writing up the state of the art in the particular area worked in, such as RDF thesauri, storing RDF in relational databases, Mozilla and sitemaps. With respect to this workpackage, the partners will undertake to make all this information public on the website with a persistent URL and promoted in the community. All partners will contribute throughout Europe to the dissemination information about the project and its results at conferences and seminars. Example conferences include the World Wide Web conference; the Semantic Web Symposium series; XML Europe and XML Conference; the Knowledge Technologies series; Digital libraries conferences such as ECDL.
A workshop to start the project will allow partners to gather information from the Semantic Web community about the technologies and experiences available at the start, and also inform the communities of the existence of the project as a hub for linking projects and as a locus of advanced research and practical analysis of the Semantic Web technologies. A workshop to end the project will allow partners to disseminate results and experiences from the project to relevant communities and identify pathways for future research and sustainability of project outputs (where appropriate).
The primary language of work is expected to be English. Where there exists a large community working in another language, support will be provided to make that work and its results available in English. At least one presentation each year can be given in each of the following languages: en, fr, es, it, de.
It is important that the tools, demonstrators and documents developed within the project continue to exist beyond the life of the project. The most important focus of the proposal is dissemination of Semantic Web best practice in all areas, whether directly created by the project or within the wider Semantic Web context. The project's web site will be an important persistent and continuing resource for developers and commercial implementers in the European Community and beyond. The project's participants are committed to the creation and maintenance of many software tools under the Open Source/Free Software model, a proven means to continue useful software beyond project lifetimes.
Partners also have the infrastructure to exploit software tools and information in a commercial context, either software development or through service provision such as training. It is important to test whether the tools and approaches can be used in a commercial setting as a model for widescale implementation of Semantic Web applications.
Partners also have experience and interest in publishing in academic journals and at academic conferences, and also creating web publications. A major commitment in the project is guaranteeing URL persistence for software and documentation for at least as long as the technical coordinating partner W3C exists in its current form.
Software deliverables will licensed as Open Source and will be made freely available, where commercially appropriate. Documentation, conclusions and results will be published in academic journals and conferences and on the web, referencing related projects where appropriate. All partners will use any standards that are applicable in writing software.
The project includes an active developer outreach effort. We anticipate a presentation (public or to selected developer groups) in at least one European country, every 12-16 weeks. This outreach work will range from small 'clinics' to larger workshops, and targeted at four key audiences outlined in WP2: content and tool producers, academic/research, opensource developers and commercial implementors.
Note: we are including some standard deliverables in the main Description of Work, so that they can be more easily incorporated into a complete overview of the project's work. Standard deliverables are marked as such.