Training resources and e-Government services for rural SMEs : the rural inclusion platform

Rural Inclusion, a project supported by the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme of the European Commission, aims to adopt, adapt, and deploy a Web infrastructure, in rural settings, combining semantics with a collaborative training and networking approach, offering e-Government services that will be supported by a rigorous and reusable service process analysis and modeling, and facilitating the disambiguation of the small businesses needs and requirements when trying to carry out the particular transactions. This paper, presents an overview of the architecture of RuralObservatory2.0 which will play the critical role of training content and eGovernment services repository of the overall Rural Inclusion platform.</jats:p

An evaluation study of clustering algorithms in the scope of user communities assessment

AbstractIn this paper, we provide the results of ongoing work in Magnet Beyond project, regarding social networking services. We introduce an integrated social networking framework through the definition or the appropriate notions and metrics. This allows one to run an evaluation study of three widely used clustering methods (k-means, hierarchical and spectral clustering) in the scope of social groups assessment and in regard to the cardinality of the profile used to assess users’ preferences. Such an evaluation study is performed in the context of our service requirements (i.e. on the basis of equal-sized group formation and of maximization of interests’ commonalities between users within each social group). The experimental results indicate that spectral clustering, due to the optimization it offers in terms of normalized cut minimization, is applicable within the context of Magnet Beyond socialization services. Regarding profile’s cardinality impact on the system performance, this is shown to be highly dependent on the underlying distribution that characterizes the frequency of user preferences appearance. Our work also incorporates the introduction of a heuristic algorithm that assigns new users that join the service into appropriate social groups, once the service has been initialized and the groups have been assessed using spectral clustering. The results clearly show that our approach is able to adhere to the service requirements as new users join the system, without the need of an iterative spectral clustering application that is computationally demanding

ROTA: An archipelago-wide area network for high speed communication to ships

The ROTA project is aimed at offering high-speed network connections to ships traveling at archipelagos, i.e. seas with dense clusters of islands, such as the Aegean sea. The ROTA system is based on the use of directional antennas on-board the ships and stationary antennas on the islands. The stationary antennas on the islands are connected to high-speed commercial computer networks, which are available on practically all inhabited islands at the Aegean sea, thus implementing a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This approach is much more cost-effective when compared to current approaches that rely on the usage of satellite communications. This paper presents the concept behind ROTA platform