An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals

Simulation support for internet-based energy services

The rapidly developing Internet broadband network offers new opportunities for deploying a range of energy, environment and health-related services for people in their homes and workplaces. Several of these services can be enabled or enhanced through the application of building simulation. This paper describes the infrastructure for e-services under test within a European research project and shows the potential for simulation support for these services

The DECIDE Project: Designing and Implementing a Prototype Service for Supporting Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

This paper will present the design and implementation challenges of the innovative DECIDE service, to support research and early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. DECIDE service, which is based on a Grid eInfrastructure, offers a set of tools providing quantitative measurements, to help researchers and clinicians make more informed diagnosis. As the service specifically targets the clinical community, it differs significantly from other initiatives since it needs to comply with the requirements imposed by the clinical routine in terms of accuracy, robustness, ease of use, data handling policies, adherence to clinical praxis. Moreover, sustainability aspects will also be discussed, since DECIDE aims to propose such service as a reference at European level, possibly extending it to other pathologies. We will then summarize the main results obtained to date, and the possible future developments

Enabling quantitative data analysis through e-infrastructures

This paper discusses how quantitative data analysis in the social sciences can engage with and exploit an e-Infrastructure. We highlight how a number of activities which are central to quantitative data analysis, referred to as ‘data management’, can benefit from e-infrastructure support. We conclude by discussing how these issues are relevant to the DAMES (Data Management through e-Social Science) research Node, an ongoing project that aims to develop e-Infrastructural resources for quantitative data analysis in the social sciences