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Innovation and Scientific Research |
Four new european research projects for CEFRIEL
Milan is the city at the cutting edge of scientific creativity and innovation in Italy and the fourth in Europe, following Munich, Stockholm and Amsterdam.
This is what the Chamber of Commerce of Milan stated in October 2007 on the basis of two benchmarks: the number of scientific publications by authors from the metropolitan area and the number of European patent applications (both every 1000 inhabitants). The survey's results show that in Milan there are 72 scientific publications every 1000 inhabitants and a large group both of inventors (two every 1000 inhabitants) and of patents' applicants (three every 1000 inhabitants).
Of course the presence of important universities and numerous centres of excellence, focused on different sectors, facilitates the innovation success in Milan. In the ICT field CEFRIEL actively contributes to the development of Italian research in Europe and has been taking part for a long time into the international research projects funded by the European Union's Framework Programs.
In particular, this year the first call of the Seventh Framework Program approved four projects in which CEFRIEL is involved: Service-Finder, LarKC, Optimix and SOA4all. For one of them, Service-Finder, CEFRIEL is also the coordinator of the international project team.
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Service-Finder
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Today the Web is moving from a collection of static documents to a set of services (Web Services), which enable applications to access and use these services over the Internet. In parallel, also the role of web users is changing, with a shift from a passive and consuming role to an active one, where users dynamically contribute to the creation of new contents (Web 2.0). Web Services and Web 2.0 are already being used to develop web-based applications. However, up to now applications that use Web Services do not use the Web 2.0 approach and vice-versa. The European research project Service-Finder aims at developing a platform for service discovery in which Web Services are embedded in a Web 2.0 environment, thus hiding the technological complexity to the user. In particular, the objective of this project is the realization of an architecture for a Web Service Search Engine that automatically (through the semantics) aggregates information coming from heterogeneous sources. Together with CEFRIEL, the partners of the project are Seekda (spin-off of the University of Innsbruck), Ontoprise (spin-off of the Universitaet Karlsruhe) and the University of Sheffield. Service-Finder foresees the creation of a crawler (search support program) to gather Web Services and automatically generate the related semantic descriptions, the building of index structures to make search quicker and the development of a portal to provide access to all Service-Finder's functionalities, and their usage even through an API (Application Programming Interface). Previous efforts to bring the Web Service Discovery to a web level failed because of the difficulty in performing the combined crawling of services and related documentation at the same time, in building index structures for these services and in providing an interface to effectively discover them. Service-Finder aims at overcoming these limitations thanks to the development of new crawling techniques, the automatic generation of semantic description, the indexing on a conceptual level and the analysis of the users' behavioural patterns in relation to the services they search, find and use.
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