Stefano Bertolo, European Commission DG Information Society and Media, Unit E2

1. Funding strategies for the Semantic Web: current activities and future trends in the European Union Stefano Bertolo, European Commission DG Information Society and Media, Unit E2 stefano.bertolo@cec.eu.int European Semantic Web Conference Heraklion, 31 May 2005

2. Presentation outline • Current Semantic Web activities • FP6 Call 1 and 2 • Future Semantic Web activities • FP6 Call 4 • FP6 Call 5 • FP6 Call 6 • FP7 • Strategies • Understand what we are asking for and why • Understand how we evaluate

3. Current FP6 activities • Total FP6 Call 1 and 2 funding: 137M € • Call 1 projects • AceMedia, Aim@Shape, AgentLinkIII, Alvis, Aspic, DIP, DirectInfo, Knowledge Board 2.0, Knowledge Web, Metokis, Muscle, News, Rewerse, Simac, SEKT, VIKEF • Call 2 projects • 3DTV, Axmedis, Content4All, GameTools, Holonics, Inccom, Inscape, IperG, IP-Racine, M-Pipe, NM2, Peng, Polymnia, Reveal This, WalkOnWeb, Worldscreen • ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/ist/docs/directorate_e/kmcc/call1and2_project_factsheets_v2.doc

4. Current FP6 activities • FP6 Call 1 and 2 emphasis on • Convergence between web services and semantic annotation • Standards for semantic annotation • (semi)automatic extraction of semantic annotation from text, images, video • Scalability, robustness, distributedness of KR and reasoning • Environments for KR (methodologies, editors, mediators) • Lack of temporal/dynamic KR

5. Future FP6 activities: Call 4 • 152 proposals requesting 530M€ • 1360 participants from 39 countries (reaching beyond EU) • 34.8% public/gov, 33.5% industry, 21.7% not-for-profit • Selection close to end: expect to fund ~25 projects, ~124M€ • Continued but not exclusive focus on semantic web technologies

6. Future FP6 activities: call 5 • Closing 21 september 2005 • http://fp6.cordis.lu/fp6/call_details.cfm?CALL_ID=208 • No strategic objective from DG INFSO/E2 • Infrastructure-oriented (Grid) • Opportunities under: • Semantic grid • Large test-beds • Large cultural/scientific archives

7. Future FP6 activities: call 6 • Likely to be published at the end of 2005 • Relatively modest budget: ~10M€ • Focus: search technologies for audiovisual materials • Rationale: trying to integrate into usable infrastructure components that are presently being developed separately

8. FP7 activities • FP7 to run 2007-2013 • EC proposal published April 2005 http://www.cordis.lu/fp7 • Public consultations Fall 2005 • First call early 2007, project start end 2007 • ICT remains top priority, budget may increase substantially (12B€ requested) • DG INFSO/E2 to continue SW research support

9. FP7 novelties • Projects vs Ideas • European Research Council • investigator-driven research projects • http://www.cordis.lu/fp7/ideas.htm

10. DG INFSO/E2 in FP7 looking for: • More multimedia knowledge extraction and reuse: • DG Information Society and MEDIA • Our portfolio is ‘text-heavy’ • Dissemination = shared components/data • Want to see content/media producers use tools built by SW engineers • Greater emphasis on building communities beyond researchers,including IT integrators, early adopters

11. DG INFSO/E2 in FP7 looking for: • Solutions = things YOU would want to use • Don’t assume you can start from scratch: show integration of legacy systems • Don’t scare away users with steep learning curve • ‘Eat your own dog food’: if you are not using your technology, why should others? • Don’t just build individual tools, architect a system in which they cooperate reliably • Don’t just design standards, show how they come together in a coherent stack to solve independently motivated problems that can’t be solved with existing tools/standards

12. DG INFSO/E2 in FP7 looking for: • Persistence = tools/data and research communities that thrive after EC funding is over • Don’t just expect it will happen: plan for it • Open Source whenever appropriate • Distribute data: people learn from your data as much as from your code (and data is more expensive to collect) • Plan for transportable test-beds • Third parties should be able to replicate your experiments • Prepare your data and protocols as you would want to find them if you were to replicate somebody else’s experiment

13. Strategies • Understand what we are asking for and why • why: make EU economy more competitive through use of advanced technology (Lisbon objectives) • mid-term return on research investment (not to the exclusion of basic research) • Help us recognise/define FP7 strategic objectives • Scale of ambition is to solve problems, not climb citation index • what: make sure what you are proposing would be recognized by a reasonable person as part of our published strategic objectives • what: solve EU-sized problems, not the integration problems of a single SME

14. Strategies • Understand how proposals are evaluated • The problem is stated in the SO: from you we want to hear the solution; • If you have a solution please explain your plan, i.e. all the technical steps: reviewers can be expected to be knowledgeable • If you have a plan, explain how you will manage it: • Who will do what, why, with what resources and on what time-scale • Project fail when things don’t go as planned: do credible contingency planning

15. Strategies • Understand how proposals are evaluated • Your proposal has competition: make sure the main ideas are exciting and clearly differentiate you • Avoid echoing keywords from call’s SO • Reviewing is hard work: • help the reviewers get a very concrete idea of what you want to do; • Ambition is excellent if backed up by credible plans; unsubstantiated exagerations alienate reviewers.

16. Strategies • Look for convergence/reuse • Build tools that will speed progress in other projects (solve someone else’s problem) • Use data that comes out of other projects (exploit clean semantics) • Create data that can be used by other projects (provide clean semantics)