The consortium is composed of research institutions and industrial partners of international standing. Research partners are specialists in Semantic Web Technologies, Knowledge Management, Information Extraction from text, Image Understanding, Data Mining, Document Enrichment and Knowledge Sharing.

 

Academic institutions comprise the University of Sheffield (coordinator, UK), the University of Koblenz (D), ITC-Irst (I), the University of Ljubljana (SLO) the University of Freiburg (D), CERTH (G), Labri (F), the University of Karlsruhe (D) and the Open University (UK). The role of academic partners will be to define high quality research with a precise exploitation and application pattern, mixing basic long term research with shorter term research, application and experimentation.

 

Technology providers in the project are Quinary (I), Ontoprise (D), Solcara (UK) and CognIT (N). Their role will be mainly in studying, designing and implementing the infrastructure supporting the knowledge management methodology and to support research and application.

 

End users are Rolls Royce (UK) and Fiat (I). Their role will be to provide requirements and testbeds for the knowledge management technology.

 

The consortium is largely composed of groups that have already worked together in previous very successful projects and therefore have already developed a successful modus operandi that will guarantee a rapid project focus and a smooth project management. This is particularly relevant, as this project is also building a community from areas (text management, image treatment, data management, Semantic Web, knowledge representation, HCI, etc.) which have grown mostly independently, and is expected to foster even wider future long term cooperation.