GEIE-ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, is dedicated to the advancement of European research and development in information technology and applied mathematics. Its national member institutions aim to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase cooperation with European industry. ERCIM has had considerable experience in the management of R&D projects under FP5
CNR-ISTI has carried out research in the digital library domain since 1996. This research has been conducted mainly within the framework of European and nationally funded projects including DELOS under FP5, ECHO, Scholnet, Cyclades, CLEF, and OAF. With the exception of OAF, CNR-ISTI is responsible for the scientific coordination of all these projects. These projects have stimulated numerous research and experimental activities.
Current work includes: i) the derivation of algorithms for evaluating queries expressed in the terms of different ontologies, including queries drawn from more than one ontology; ii) the design of open, scalable, and distributed architectures to support the inherently ever-expanding nature of digital libraries; iii) the definition of techniques supporting content-based access to multimedia digital libraries (e.g., audio-visual or image content), iv) methodologies for the evaluation of multilingual information retrieval systems.
CNR-ISTI will also represent the CLEF consortium in the NoE. This consortium studies and develops infrastructures for the evaluation of multilingual information retrieval systems. Members are: Eurospider Information Technology (CH), Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos – Univ. Nacional de Educaciòn a Distancia, Madrid (ES), Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaften.
Bonn (DE), Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency (FR), Department of Information Studies – Univ. of Tampere (FI), Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica - Istituto Trentino di Cultura (IT), Univ. of Twente - Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (NL), Human Computer Interaction and Language Engineering Lab.- SICS (SV).
Work at the Database Research Group (DBS) of ETH Zürich is focused on realizing the hyperdatabase infrastructure vision that combines and generalizes database technology with elements from the grid infrastructure and includes peer-to-peer data management. This infrastructure provides well- established.
UKOLN is involved in a variety of digital library research in both UK and EC funded activities. These include technical development and support of the distributed information architecture which is providing digital library resources to UK higher and further education, development of web services in this context and research in the areas of semantic web, metadata schemas and ontologies.
UKOLN also has expertise in the areas of digital preservation and Web archiving, Web standards, cross-sectoral description of collections, the development of national and institutional e-print repositories, integration of digital libraries with learning management systems and institutional portals. More recently, UKOLN is collaborating with the Grid/e-Science community through joint workshops with the National e-Science Centre and in projects linking digital library concepts with Grid-enabled applications.