European Commission
Asia-Link Programme
Fourth Call for Proposals
(2005)
Grant Application Form
Budget line 19.1002
Name of applicant: / University of TrentoDossier No
(for official use only)
Notice
Please read and complete this form with all due care. Omissions cannot be rectified; if any information or document is missing, your application will be rejected.
I. the action
1. Description
1.1 Title
Project Title:
EASTWEB: building an integrated leading Euro-Asian higher education and research community in the field of the SemanTic WEB.
1.2 Location(s)
Country(ies), region(s), town(s)
Italy, Trentino Province, Trento
Austria, Tyrol Province, Innsbruck
Ireland, Galway Province, Galway
Poland, Wielkopolska, Poznan
China, Jilin Province, Chang Chun
India, Maharashtra, Bombay
Thailand, Pathum Thani Province, Klong Luang
China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong
1.3 Amount requested from the European Commission
Total eligible cost of the action / Amount requested fromthe European Commission / % of total cost of action
1.039.087,70 € Euros / 750.000 Euros / 72 %
1.4 Summary
The goal of this project is to build an integrated leading Euro-Asian high education and research community in the field of the Semantic Web, the next generation of the Web. Direct target groups are: graduate students, faculty staff and enterprises management personnel. Indirect target groups are: European and Asian students, researchers and enterprises personnel at large. We plan to operate on the following four main actions: (1) Human resources development: joint teaching and supervision of master and doctorate students; integration and collaboration among senior and young faculty; training the next generation of IT educators as well as of IT enterprises management. (2) Distance Learning and Knowledge Management platform: to support current and future activities also after the end of the project (3) Networking: we will foster the interaction among universities and companies in Europe and Asia in the field of Semantic Web. The European partners (Italy, Austria, Ireland, Poland) are leading institutes in the Semantic Web. The Asian partners (India, Thailand, China, and the associate partner Hong Kong) are among the best performance institutions in Asia .The duration of the project is 36 months.
1.5 Objectives
Information Technology (IT) continues to evolve at an impressive rate. This happening in, and it is closely coupled to, a strongly interrelated and globalized network of institutions (nations, enterprises, markets, people etc..). These two simple observations have important implications:
1. Human Resources Development: new paradigms need to be explored. These models should assist societies and people in using IT and allow them to improve the quality of services (societies) and the quality of life (people). Furthermore, a particular attention should be put in supporting the need of the emerging societies, as well as in capturing all possible cross-fertilization aspects derived from diverse cultures and approaches.
2. Educational platforms: there is a need of new channels and supporting tools which allow the promotion of knowledge and understanding of recent developments in IT within and outside the computer science community.
3. Networking: new models need to be identified in order to assist efficiently the creation, evolution and sustainability of global networks of academic institutions and enterprises. These networks must be capable to transfer the most recent and promising developments in IT to markets, society and people in the large.
Deriving from these considerations, the overall objective of this project is to foster and promote the cooperation between European and Asian Institutions involved in IT education and research. The specific objective is to build an integrated leading Euro-Asian high education and research community in the field of the Semantic Web . The choice of Semantic Web as the core topic is motivated by the fact that it is (1) currently one of the most promising research fields in Computer Science worldwide and (2) European researchers are in this area the leading experts worldwide. The core idea of the Semantic Web is to make the meaning of the vast amount of data on the World Wide Web available to machine processing and thus intelligent queries and really helpful Internet agents. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web has the potential to be the next generation of the Web and to significantly change our daily life by lowering the barriers for accessing services and large volumes of information.
The project builds on two important assets: the first is the leading position of Europe and, in particular, of the four European Nodes involved in this proposal, in the Semantic Web; the second is that the involved three Asian Nodes are leading IT institutions with strong expertise in areas related or overlapping with the Semantic Web. To carry out the overall project objective, the three main objectives identified above can be instantiated as follows:
1. Human Resources Development: EASTWEB will explore and implement new graduate curricula
o establishing an interleaved (“sandwich”) international master program on the Semantic Web.
o establishing an international doctorate program on the Semantic Web
o establishing senior and young faculty exchange programs
Our target group, here, are top level Asian and European students, with the aim of improving their skills but also of cross-fertilizing their culture by including specific cultural courses (language, history and social aspects) in the graduate training programs. The exchange of senior and young faculty will further strengthen the creation of a common research community as well as prepare the new generation of future IT educators.
2. Distance Learning and Knowledge Management platform development: EASTWEB will explore and implement innovative educational platforms:
o establishing a distance learning platform and framework
o evolving the distance learning platform into a Knowledge Portal for Semantic Web research and applications (EASTWEB Portal)
We will collect all materials developed in the Human Resource Development activity and we will further enrich it with the material produced by related projects. We will provide a coherent, re-usable and evolving body of knowledge to all involved target groups (direct and indirect). The Knowledge Portal will be the basis for European and Asian collaboration activities after the end of the project.
3. Networking. EASTWEB will:
o support the creation and growth of the Asian research and high education community focused on the Semantic Web by organizing Summer Schools in Asia and by starting the Asian Semantic Web conference (ASWC). Although a lot of relevant experience exist, this community still does not exist in Asia
o create a cluster of global (European and Asian) enterprises, whose main goal will be to harvest the highly specialized human resources trained within EASTWEB and the research results. These companies will be kept constantly informed of the activities in EASTWEB. Among others, our goal is to make sure that students will be hired by those companies which can make the best use of the student’s technological and multicultural skills developed in EASTWEB.
1.6 Justification
(a) relevance of the action to the objectives of the programme
The main objective of the Asia-Link program is to foster regional and multilateral networking between high education institutions in Europe and in Asia.
EASTWEB implements this objective by setting up an integrated leading Euro-Asian high education and research community in the field of the Semantic Web (the next generation of the Web) with the purpose to provide practical solutions (models, methods, tools, patterns) to education, research, social and business issues in this specific and promising IT area. It will do so, by strengthening the Semantic Web network among leading institutions in Italy, Austria, Ireland and Poland and some of the best performance institutions in Asia covering India, Thailand and China (plus Hong Kong).
In summary, our proposal has the following features reflecting the general goals of the program:
§ Geographical coverage and socio-economic relevance of involved countries.
Our consortium consists of four EU universities and one EU research institution (as associate partner) leading in IT education and research and in the specific domain area (Semantic Web), three high quality Asian outreaching units, and one university in Hong Kong, as an associate partner. The three participating institutes in Asia cover South East Asia (India and Thailand) and China (mainland China and Hong Kong). India has a strong and fast development in software engineering and software industry. China is now one of the fast growing countries in the world. Thailand has already active research on Semantic Web and they are ready to extend their collaboration with leading Semantic Web institutions in Europe. Given the fact of the important geographical location and economic leading position of Hong Kong in Asia, our collaborating partner there, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, will act as a important dissemination center in Asia, as well as an attractive multi-culture international research and educating center.
§ Support co-operation, mutual cross-fertilization including cultural integration, between institutions of higher education in a perspective of mutual interest: the EASTWEB consortium has already started a preliminary stage of co-operation between some of the partners (exchange students schema, initial common research activities). The involved consortium institutions are interested in expanding these existing collaborations to a complete and mutual collaboration schema that will support short, medium and long term objectives in the three main target areas, as identified in section 1.5
(b) relevance of the action to the priorities of the programme
EASTWEB addresses mainly the Asia-Link priority on Human Resources Development. To reach specific objectives in this priority, we propose to use and extend distance education tools and platforms. Therefore, EASTWEB will also partially impact on the Curriculum Development priority.
For what concerns the Human Resource Development, EASTWEB will enact this Asia-Link priority in the following activities:
1. Explore and implement new higher educational human resources development programme between Europe and Asia in the field of the Semantic Web. In particular EASTWEB will:
o establish an interleaved (“sandwich”) international master program on the Semantic Web.
o establishing an international doctorate program on the Semantic Web
o establishing senior and young faculty exchange programs
Both programs (Master and PhD) will be integrated with and built on top of the existing programs in the participating academic institutions and will contains joint-teaching on fundamental courses, joint researching activities, and joint supervision on Theses. The instruction language will be English. The EASTWEB project will provide support for longer term mobility for European and Asian students and for shorter term mobility of the senior and young faculty. The programs will make extensive use of a distance learning platform, tools and methodologies. Moreover, internship projects in both European and/or Asian enterprises will be an integral part of the Master and PhD programs and will be coupled to the networking activity (more in the specific activity below). In the PhD program, the focus will be the joint supervision of doctorate students.
The short-term goal of this activity will be the establishment of an interleaved (“sandwich”) international master and PhD program. The medium term goal, to be achieved within the scope of the present project, is the organization of double degree programs between the participating institutions, wherever feasible. The long term goal will be the creation of a sustainable long-term exchanging and training program by bridging EASTWEB educational activities with active European projects, such as the Erasmus Mundus Master of Informatics(EuMi), and institutions, such as the Virtual Institute for Semantic Web Education (VISWE). Moreover, EASTWEB aims to train the next generation of future IT educators and IT enterprises management.
2. Enhance the teaching and learning experience both in a virtual and actual community of students and teaching staff. EASTWEB will enact this activity by:
o establishing a distance learning platform and framework
o evolving the distance learning platform into a Knowledge Portal for Semantic Web research and application (EASTWEB Portal)
To support the previous Human Resources Development activities, EASTWEB will explore, develop and extensively use new channels and supporting tools for knowledge sharing, in particular distance learning and knowledge management platforms.
The initial platform will consist of an extension of the existing eLearning platforms used within the European institutions. Such platform will be enriched with new education and research material produced by the partners along the project. It will include course material used in the master and doctorate programs but also further material such as presentations, papers, theses, prototypes developed within the partner institutions and links to other on-going initiatives in Europe and Asia. In particular, the eLearning portal will exploit the results for Semantic Web higher education and training built by the EU Knowledge Web Network of Excellence. The portal will integrate different tools, like systems for tele- and video- conferencing, and software supporting collaborative work.
In the second phase of the project, on top of the collected and produced material as well as on top of the gathered practical experience, EASTWEB will evolve the eLearning platform into a Knowledge Portal for Semantic Web activities within and outside the consortium.
We want to provide a coherent, usable, sustainable and evolving body of knowledge to all involved target groups (direct and indirect). This will be the basis for European and Asian collaboration activities (both academic and industrial) after the end of the project.
The short-term goal is to use and validate the platform supporting both the Master and PhD programs. The medium term goal is to establish a Knowledge Portal Semantic Web activities within and outside the consortium. The long term goal of these actions is to provide a coherent, sustainable and evolving body of knowledge to all direct and indirect target groups.
3. Explore models and execute actions to assist European and Asian enterprises, societies and people in using and exploiting Semantic Web results and products to improve business (enterprises), quality of services (societies) and quality of life (people).
EASTWEB will enact this activity by:
o disseminate internationally educational and research activities. The activities will include participation and involvement in existing international educational activities, such as the Summer School on the Semantic Web (http://babage.dia.fi.upm.es/summerschool/, organized by the European Network of Excellence Knowledge Web), periodic scholar exchanges, training of young researchers and faculty, co-sponsoring and co-organization of international workshops and conferences on Semantic Web issues and application.