Smart Brain

SIMMO

The general aim of the “SIMMO: System for Intelligent Maritime MOnitoring” project is to develop a prototype of a system, based on the state-of-the-art information fusion and intelligence analysis techniques, which will support different stakeholders and users from the maritime domain in situation analysis and decision-making.

The scope of the SIMMO project covers developing methods for automatic and constant retrieval, processing and enhancement of data from two types of data sources:

• satellite and terrestrial Automatic Identification System (AIS), which provide inter alia generic information about ships and their positions,
• open Internet sources, which can provide additional information about ships.

The actual data, acquired from both sources, will be automatically integrated and fused by the system. Finally, the inference process on top of the fused data will take place, aiming at detecting suspicious ships with regard to specified threat types. The enhanced information about ships as well as detected potential threats will be visualized in order to allow a user to observe actual situation at sea and quickly track suspicious ships.

The SIMMO project is conducted by consortium consisting of 2 partners: Poznan University of Economics (Project Leader) and LuxSpace Sarl.

The project is funded by the European Defence Agency within the Programme “The Defence R&T Joint Investment Programme on Second Innovative Concepts and Emerging Technologies (JIP-ICET 2)” under Call “Second Innovative Concepts and Emerging Technologies ICET 2”. The project will be carried out from 30.10.2014 to 31.12.2015.

e-UM: the digitalization of services and exchange of correspondence in the Marshal Offices of the Wielkopolska and Kuyavia and Pomerania Regions

The project "e-UM: the digitalization of services and exchange of correspondence in the Marshal Offices of the Wielkopolska and Kuyavia and Pomerania Regions" is to improve the management systems of the local government administrations in Wielkopolska and Kuyavia and Pomerania Regions. The e-UM project aims inter alia at solving the problem of the lacking awareness among the residents of the aforementioned regions of the possibility to use public electronic services while completing administrative matters. It is also to design these services and make them available at the ePUAP Platform.

The number of e-Services being offered (including new services as well as subject to digitalization) and provided by the local government units through the ePUAP platform or diverse regional platforms compatible to ePUAP is increasing. The digitalisation of the services is possible, inter alia, due to the implementation of the process approach, mapping of the administrative processes for e-Services and the implementation and upgrade of advanced IT solutions. Moreover, other, previously not available services are proposes such as a domain specific IT system being in fact a search engine of legal acts.

The e-UM project involves three entities:

• The Marshal Office of the Wielkopolska Region in Poznań
• The Marshal Office of the Kuyavia and Pomerania Region in Toruń
• Poznan University of Economics

The recipients of the project are all inhabitants of both regions, as well as employees of the local governments and public authorities who, through the planned workshops and training sessions, conferences and promotional campaigns will be informed and trained on the possibilities of convenient, fast, and electronic processing of administrative matters.

The project "e-UM: the digitalization of services and exchange of correspondence in the Marshal Offices of the Wielkopolska and Kuyavia and Pomerania Regions" is financed from the Human Capital Programme, contest no. 2/POKL/5.2.1/2013. The project will be carried out from 01.04.2014 to 31.08.2015. Project Number: POKL.05.02.01-00-002/14.

Smart Data Analysis for the Support of Rational Decision Making in the Energy Sector

The project is dedicated for an energy sector analyst who wants to estimate the forecast of energy demand and energy generation for an artificially defined area. As a result of the work the extended version of the prototype of an in-memory Business Intelligence solution using SAP HANA and Crystal Reports will be created. The solution is a tool that allows for preparing a pre-defined set of forecasting models and reports, which, unlike to other commercial solutions, gives the user the possibility of choosing sophisticated models with large amount of variables. The project is focused on the analysis of the structured data such as energy consumption and energy generation from RES, meteorological data, which is strongly correlated with the energy data, as well as on the analysis of the unstructured data (as an example - unstructured data available on Internet portals or forums that may contain opinions from the current and future clients on the energy providers’ offers and products).

Prototype of an In-Memory Business Intelligence Solution for the Support of Forecasting of Energy Load Demand

The proposed project aimed at building an environment that would wrap algorithms programs written by our team in SAP HANA to provide easy to use and flexible tool for business entities coming from the energy sector and to enable them to apply different forecasting models, dynamic visualizations and make modifications to existing approaches by introducing new variables or changing the parameters. The additional goal was to evaluate SAP HANA reporting capabilities.

The short synopsis of the project’s main scenario may be presented in a condensed form as follows (The Elevator Pitch style presentation of the main scenario):

FOR: An energy sector analyst

WHO: wants to estimate the forecasts of energy demand and energy generation from renewable energy for an artificially defined area

THE: prototype of an in-memory Business Intelligence solution using SAP HANA and Crystal Reports

IS A: tool that allows for preparing a pre-defined set of forecasting models and reports

UNLIKE: other commercial solutions that enable users to choose only strictly static models that are based only on a small number of variables

OUR PROJECT: enables any energy analyst, without prior programming knowledge, to calculate and compare, in a dynamic manner, various energy forecasts (energy demand and RES generation) for an artificially defined area. The additional goal of the project was to acquire and analyze additional energy data, design and implement new forecasting methods, evaluate efficiency and performance of different computational strategies, as well as examine various reporting capabilities of SAP HANA and Crystal Reports. One of the research hypothesis that we focused on, was that the gathered data, both on the load demand and generation, should make it possible to carry out the market simulations even for the artificially defined area.

Forecasting of Energy Load Demand and Energy Production from Renewable Sources using In-Memory Computing

Within the conducted project, we focused on a time series approach in order to predict the short-term energy demand value. We applied the time series methods at an individual dwelling level. We formulated a hypothesis: forecasting accuracy (which is directly related to costs) can be substantially increased by the application of various individual forecasting methods not only on the level of each customer but also for each generation unit (wind turbine, photovoltaic panel) performed in quasi real-time using SAP HANA parallelism. Through this new insights into the analyzed data can be gained. The additional goal of the project was to evaluate the possibility of adding different exogenous variables to the models and being able to quickly analyze their significance.

Quasi Real-Time Individual Customer Based Forecasting of Energy Load Demand Using In Memory Computing

The goal of the project was to design and implement quasi-real time load forecasting for a big number of individual customers profiles using in-memory computing. We formulated a hypothesis: forecasting accuracy can be substantially increased by individual forecasting on the level of each customer done in quasi real-time using SAP HANA parallelism. The additional goal of the project was also to evaluate efficiency and performance of other computational strategies. Also, the possibility for adding different exogenous variables to the models and being able to quickly analyze their significance opens up new applications of energy load forecasting.

Semantic Monitoring of Cyberspace

Internet is evolving rapidly, being present in every aspect of our lives. Today’s society except from using Internet for fun or work, has also to handle multiple cyber threats. The major objective of the SMC project, that is financed by the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR), is to integrate data from heterogeneous sources and enable for automatic detection of cyber threats. The project therefore faces the following challenges related to automated detection of Internet threats:

• handling large amount of structured and unstructured data,
• integrating data from diverse sources,
• evaluating if particular activity or data indicate a cyber threat.

Information from chosen Internet sources, like social network sites or on-line auction services, will be filtered applying a threat profile to find a particular threat. Experts’ role will be limited to definition of the detection process and a profile of a cyber threat.

SMC aims to create a prototype enabling for monitoring of various Internet sources in order to detect cyber threats. Monitoring process should be executed automatically and result in a message about threats found. SMC integrates expertise from areas of information retrieval, information extraction, information filters and data mining. Results are to overcome problems with automatic monitoring of heterogeneous Internet sources, both deep and visible Web. Information from structured internal repositories will be integrated with information from chosen Web unstructured and structured sources. Since a profile of cyber threat is too complex to build it manually, experts will focus on definition of methods of construction of the profile. Then, using information from predefined sources, profile will be automatically developed and will evolve to follow changes of a potential threat. Therefore, threat profile as complex information filter can be used to detect cyber threats and the role of specialists is determined only to definition of monitoring process.

The main outcomes include:

• Identification of classes of threats. Construction of rules and methods for creation (and update) of a threat profile.
• Mechanism for monitoring of sources from the visible and hidden Web as well as integration of data from structured and unstructured sources.
• Demonstration of a working scenario for detecting cyber threats.

Webpage: http://smc.kie.ue.poznan.pl/en/

INSEMTIVES

INSEMTIVES is a FP 7 collaborative project funded by through the grant number FP 7-231181 under EU Objective 4.3 . It brings together program computer scientists, software engineers, economists, social scientists and end-users from eight European countries, coordinated by STI Innsbruck from Austria. The aim of INSEMTIVES is to bridge the gap between human and computational intelligence in the current semantic content authoring R&D landscape. The project aims at producing methodologies, methods and tools that enable the massive creation and feasible management of semantic content in order to facilitate the worldwide up­take of semantic technologies. Department of Information Systems in the project will be responsible for development of business models as well as tools supporting creation of semantic content using mobile devices.

IS-LINK

IS:link is a network of renowned Information Systems (IS) schools at universities around the world. It is dedicated to promoting student exchange and academic fellowships within the IS field. IS:link assists students and academics in planning a rewarding time of study abroad and research that is seamlessly integrated with their programs and fields of activity at their home university.

EGO

Tools enabling users to deal with the information overload are invaluable for every member of information society. The Ego project, financed by the National Centre for Research and Development (project number NR11-0037-10), is to enable people to semi-automatically create their representations, called virtual identities, to manifest their information needs in various Web sources. The project integrates achievements from the fields of user modelling and identity management. The virtual identity will be an evolving, complex user model. During Internet browsing special software component will collect information about user's interests and update his virtual identity. Simultaneously, during browsing, a previously created user profile will be presented to information sources. The user will be able to restrict amount and type of information presented to a particular service/source.

eXtraSpec

eXtraSpec is a research project realized by DIS. The goal of this project is to create a solution that analize internal documents of the organization and external Web sources in order to find an expert from the specific domain or who has specific competencies.

Project eXtraSpec is an innovative solution that identyfies problems from HR domain. Project result might be used in a wide spectrum of organizations where appeared a need to find an expert with a particular skills. Our solution can be use in public institution as well as in enterprises. It is possible to search experts among employees (e.g. while composing a team for internal project) or while looking for a potential candidates. Project results will contribute to decreasing information asymmetry at labor-market and partially converting tacit knowledge into explicit and widely used knowlegde. Main goals of the project:

• C1. Development of stardard for describing skills and professional experience of the expert.
• C2. Model and implementation of knowledge base about experts, based on the information from specific sources from Polish Web.
• C3. Implementation of tool that enables to search knowledge base and navigate on results.

Project eXtraSpec is financed under the Operational Program Innovative Economy and partially supported by European Union's European Regional Development Fund programme.

Integror

Integror is a department-internal project focused on different levels of data and information integration on the Web. Our interests include integration of structured and semi-structured data from information-intensive Web and Deep Web sources, as well as intuitive and semi-automatic visual integration of unstructured content blocks. The foundations of the integration task are two innovative and robust formalisms: first capable of in-page content addressing and second responsible for navigational paths description.

The former of the formalisms is based on relative XPath addressing and displays visibly better robustness than state-of-the-art absolute-XPath based schemes. Its application to information integration task made possible creation of myPortal - an intuitive, user-friendly and robust application allowing creation of personalized portals based on logical content blocks extracted of pre-defined pages. With myPortal two mouse clicks are enough to create content block extraction rules; next, the extracted blocks can be composed into an integrated information view (personalized web portal). The method was proved to be highly resilient to changes. Several publications (including demonstrations at VLDB and WWW conferences) describe myPortal in more detail.

The letter of the formalisms - based on FSA (Finite State Automata) description of user navigation and pumping lemma - altogether with relative XPath gave birth to DWDI (Deep Web Data Integration) application. It allows integration of data from semi-structural and structural navigation (browsing) and forms-based Web sources. With DWDI, recorded user navigation path can be used to create description of Web or Deep Web source navigation pattern and relative XPath is used to describe location of data blocks on the page.

Current research directions aim at creation of mechanisms enabling more robust and adaptive addressing of different types of Web objects in dynamic environment (e.g. involving changing Web sites structures and Web pages structures). They include: use of visual characteristics-based and 2D addressing of content blocks in Web pages, automatic detection of relative XPath reference points, handling of conflicts between multiple addresses of the same Web object, as well as work on capability to operate in presence of technical problems (non standards-compliant code, 404 errors, etc.). Project's research includes also surveys on the applications and business models of enhanced Web objects addressing, on the nature and topicality of Deep Web sources as well as on the visual and navigational ways of presenting database content on the Web. Future research plans include also using F-Webs project's experience to implement QoS-based Web sources evaluation and selection schemes.

Filtering Web Services

Project is carried out at the Department of Management Information Systems of The Poznan University of Economics. The main aim of the project is to build Web services filtering system. Web services technology is changing the Internet and way the business is done today. Dealing with Web services is mostly manual process, the web services environment is not machine friendly. The Web services description, provided today by WSDL documents or UDDI repository, is not good enough and that is why automatic searching, comparing, filtering or configuration is simply impossible. Moreover it does not allow us in many cases to do it manually either. The goal of system F-WebS is to make it possible. The client of our system can be for example complex application, that consists of one or more components, which are Web services. These components are the best available (according to the user needs) at the moment. However, Web services market isn' t static and new Web services still emerge. The goal of application is to consist of the best available components so it has to replace old Web services to new, better ones, once they are found by our system. The main advantages: the application (the client of our filtering Web service) is always up-to-date, process is done automatically, improved Web service description.

Contexts

The goal of this department-internal project is to build a model of context-aware indexing and filtering of Polish natural language documents. The main effort in the first phase is put into identification and disambiguation of entities in free text. The categories of entities we consider five basic dimensions of document's context, i.e.: location, organization, person, product and time constitute. The second phase will result with a model of a multi-dimensional index of free text documents' content. The results of the project will be utilized by a system supporting real estates' value estimation and information fusion for public relations research.

Service Web 3.0

Even after four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly intelligent applications. Emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web or Web Services transform the Internet from a network of information to a network of knowledge and services. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. The mission of Service Web 3.0 to address these emerging developments and contribute to the implementation of framework programmes and their projects, and support the preparation of future community research and technological development. The project focuses on:

• organization of special focused conferences and seminars,
• establishment of collaborative groups and publication of roadmaps to facilitate a communal framework for a future service world,
• providing support for standardisation activities for semantic service descriptions,
• discovery and development of synergies through networking and cross-fertilisation with other research and network projects related to this area,
• setting up dedicated cross-project clusters focusing on Semantic Web Services within STI International,
• provision of information material comprising white papers, feasibility studies, promotional movies and raise awareness for technology adoption.

Integration Platform, as a methodology to create solutions for local government institutions

The "Integration Platform, as a methodology to create solutions for local government institutions" project conducted under a grant of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education is another initiative of the Department of Information Systems, which concerns the problem of solutions enabling device integration and sharing of the resources needed to provide selected electronic services. In this study DIS aim to solve the problems of integration of information systems through the use of open technology facilitating device interoperability presence at different levels.

One of the expected results of the project is the concept of integration platform. On its basis the creation of methodology to produce services for local government and IT institutions is planned. Currently there are determinants of technical and organizational nature that make the rendering of electronic services by the local government units difficult. A variety of systems built on different technologies do not collaborate with one another, and their integration with one another bear the costs often comparable to the implementation of completely new project. The projected platform is designed using open standards in order to ensure the widest possible access and the greatest possibilities of integrating current systems architecture.

In order to demonstrate feasibility of the concept, the platform will be initially deployed for the test purposes only. Then, on the basis of platform integration will be developed methodology to create services for local government units. The methodology will show how the platform can be effectively used. The long term performance of the project will be measured by significant reduction in the effort needed to create the information society services.

Semantic Utilised for Process Management within and between Enterprises

The major objective of SUPER European Project is to raise Business Process Management (BPM) to the business level, where it belongs, from the IT level where it mostly resides now. This objective requires that BPM is accessible at the level of semantics of business experts. In order to achieve this aim Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (SWS) technology is utilized together with Business Process Management (BPM) expertise. Semantic Web and, in particular, SWS technology offer the promise of integrating applications at the semantic level. By combining SWS and BPM, and developing one consolidated technology SUPER creates horizontal ontologies which describe business processes and vertical telecommunications oriented ontologies to support domain-specific annotation. Therefore this project aims at providing a semantic-based and context-aware tools and framework, based on Semantic Web Services technology that acquire, organise, share and use the knowledge embedded in business processes within existing IT systems and software, and within employees' heads, in order to make companies more adaptive.

The project answers the two most urgent issues emerging from BPM: shift in control of processes from IT professionals to business natives and carrying up business process management to a new complexity level. Department of Information Systems is an active participant of the project's consortium and took part in several work packages. Apart from the dissemination of project's results DIS was involved in the research conducted within several work packages. Specific tasks of DIS include:

• WP1 Semantic BP Ontology and BP Operational Semantics: creation of several ontologies used for describing processes, services and business functions performed by industrial partners
• WP3 Dynamic Semantic Process Composition: development of Semantic Business Process Library, extension of process composition algorithm with non-functional properties, implementation of Business Process Discoverer, research on choreography of semantically described process models
• WP4 Business Process Mediation: translation from sBPMN and sEPC to BPMO that uses XPDL representation of business processes
• WP7 Architecture, Interoperability and Integration: DIS was involved in preliminary tasks related to creation of conceptual model of SUPER architecture

Additionally, DIS coordinates SUPER PhD Programme, which goal is to help PhD students involved in the project to exchange their ideas with others and to get feedback from more experienced researchers.

Time-determined ontology based information system for real time stock market analysis

TOWL - Time-determined Ontology based information system for real time stock market analysis. The objective of this 6 Framework Programme financed project is to develop methods and prototype system reasoning about stock price changes based on information extracted from textual news feeds for finance domain. The news available to investors are one of the main determinants of their behavior and predictions of market evolution. Therefore the interpretation of semantics of news may facilitate analysis and prediction of market situation.

The project aims at expanding current state-of-the-art ontology languages (OWL, RDF-S, RDF) by adding time dimension to enable real-time, context aware information analysis. During the course of the project the semantic stock broker system will be developed based on time determined ontology of witch the actual state depends on textual news messages and numerical market information. The system will interpret these messages and adapt the ontology to better match the real world as described in the news. The potential impact of the demonstration application in the stock exchange domain results from improved ROI by using an effective knowledge system support.

Usability-driven Open Platform for Mobile Government

USE-ME.GOV is an EU research and development project design to support and encourage the access to new e-government services at any time and anywhere through the use of mobile communications and Internet technologies. The long term goal is to contribute to a Next-Generation Open Service Platform for mobile users that can be shared by networked authorities and institutions (e.g. on a regional scale) in terms of technical infrastructure, information (content) as well as a framework for commercial exploitation. The Open Service Platform will comply with high-level requirements that impact, positively on the overall cost of deployment, such as sharing of information (content), independence from commercial off-the-shelf software, interoperability and scalability. USE-ME.GOV services will address specific user needs, with different background, age and interests, overcome bureaucratic barriers, enhance quality of life for citizen and help private companies to streamline their business activities. They will feature a high level of usability and user friendliness, allowing for easy search of information considering location, context and user interests. Services will be easy to configure and deploy, not depending on expensive software-hardware products or demanding technological skills, allowing for shared use of technical resources and content. The USE-ME.GOV service platform will be built on Web Service technology, allowing for communication between components on different platforms based on different standards. Open standards will be applied to service interface descriptions, location service protocols, service request protocols, privacy policies, security models and to data formats such as for geographical and location information. The USE-ME.gOV project will support authorities entering the mobile market by providing an open source platform that enables authorities: to share common modules with other departments or authorities (for example subscription, alerting components), to secure development and operation by open source transparency, to attract further mobile operator independent of respective interfaces and to estimate efforts, outcome and benefits in advance.

enhanced Information Retrieval and Filtering for Analytical Systems

Today successful competing on the market requires better handling of external and internal information in companies and local governments. Their managers demand tools that could gather, process and store information and knowledge management information systems (MIS).

Our key competence is information filtering for MIS. The information filtering system is an access service that stands between information source and information consumer, providing a personalized view on the information space. Contemporary information retrieval and filtering (iRaF) systems lack the appropriate representation of user information needs and information itself. This has motivated us to undertake a project that would enhance our iRaF key competencies and also improve iRaF system in order to better satisfy user needs. Our innovative concept is to join the achievements in information filtering, knowledge representation and decision support systems. Semantic Web technologies and especially the use of ontologies, are expected to enable a much higher degree of automation in performing operations pertaining to the searching and extracting information.

Adaptive Services Grid

The goal of Adaptive Services Grid (ASG) is to develop a proof-of-concept prototype of an open development platform for adaptive services discovery, creation, composition, and enactment. To achieve its goal, ASG addresses scientific and technological issues making use of the knowledge and expertise of major European research institutions with significant contributions from the software, telecommunications, and telematics industry.

ASG provides the integration of its subprojects in the context of an open platform, including tool development by small and medium sized enterprises. Based on semantic specifications of requested services by service customers, ASG discovers appropriate services, composes complex processes and if required generates software to create new application services on demand. Subsequently, application services will be provided through the underlying computational grid infrastructure based on adaptive process enactment technology.

In the proposed project, methods and concepts from software architectures, software development methodologies, Web services composition and workflow process planning and coordination will be complemented by recent results in domain engineering, software generation and Semantic web and agent negotiation research. Impact on a European level is supported by strong industry involvement both with respect to platform development, deployment, and exploitation in the areas of telecommunications and telematics. To this end, ASG makes a difference for the people in the Society since it helps bridging the gap between member states and important candidate states in the areas of telecommunications, telematics, and enterprise IT.

SENECA: Semantic Networks and Categorization

Information retrieval deals with the representation, storage, organisation and access to information. The representation and organisation of the information items should provide the user with easy access to the information in which they are interested. The general aim of SENECA project is to improve precision and recall of information retrieval such as: searching, document matching and classification or identification of web services. The improvement in relevancy can be achieved by using knowledge representation - thesauri, semantic networks and ontologies. The availability of these structures is however limited, therefore one of our goals is to create them automatically by deriving concept hierarchies, word disambiguation and term clustering. Effective text matching using semantic knowledge can be used in protecting corporate intellectual property, as for example plagiarism detection, filtering of corporate document stream or matching patent specifications. Project Objectives:

• Automated concept disambiguation
• Automated domain knowledge representation (ontology building) using web sources
• Evalution of ontologies on selected domain document corpora
• Using ontologies to improve effectivity of searching techniques
• Intellectual property protection and plagiarism detection
• Ontology application in classification of web services
• Identifying business processes to match appropriate web services

EastWeb

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 three 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.

mobile Information Filtering

mobileIF is a project conducted at the Department of Management Information Systems of The Poznan University of Economics. It aims at introducing new methods of acquiring, organizing, processing, sharing and using the information from various sources and disseminating it to users. The main objective of the application is to enable access to knowledge anytime, anywhere, and anyplace depending on the current user's context. In other words, such information must be cognitive, time, contact, location and economic relevant. It needs to take into account present user's tasks at hand and processes he or she is involved in. With ontology support, system is able to provide logical relationships between external web sources and domain knowledge repository. Furthermore, mobileIF employs ontology in user customization process. System reflects all important information regarding to user's business and social activities and interests. From our point of view, these will allow to better reflect user information needs, support profiling, filtering, and retrieval processes. In addition, mobileIF utilizes web services in broad range to establish communication between mobile devices, system components, and internal or external data sources. Web services architecture enables third parties to access to mobileIF, as well. Thanks to the use of web services, mobileIF is virtually platform-independent. These should increase communication among organizations and individuals, provide value-added services, support new work methods for businesses, e-learning, collaborative environments and improve customer relationships and business activity

enhanced Value Estimation of Real Estates

eVEREst is a project devoted to the subject of real estates value estimation. The aim of the project is to support the system storing data about real estates (e.g. cadastral system) with information filtered from external sources (i.e. Internet). This additional information would be used in the process of estimating the market value of real estates. The presumption of the system is that the value of real estate depends on several factors that can be divided into three groups: socio-economical (f.e. level of pollution, noise, crime, neighbourhood, income per capita in the area, type of buildings), infrastructural (motorways, media, communication) and environmental (natural disasters, parks, forests, landscape). Data and information about these factors can be found in structured (databases) and unstructured sources (press releases, web pages of news agencies, etc.). Based on this assumption eKW concept will be utilized. Documents filtered from the Internet will be automatically indexed in three different ways (cognitive, time and spatial) in order to enable bounding with specific object in the real estates database. In next step enhanced report about each of the real estates can be presented. In the second phase of the project an expert system that will enable automated value estimation is to be implemented.. eVEREst is based on technologies such as information retrieval, collaborative filtering, data warehouses. Moreover ontology and web services are introduced in order to increase interoperability among its parts.

enhanced Knowledge Warehouse

One can observe a constantly-growing importance of external information in the decision making process. Business users are faced with the problem of an increasing amount of information. What they need is up-to-date, relevant, and well-organized information, but what they have available is distributed and unstructured information stored in heterogeneous sources. Our idea is to organize unstructured data in the data warehouse. As the management guru Peter Drucker argues, the challenge is "to organize outside data because change occurs from the outside." However, we should not limit ourselves to using external sources alone. Data warehouse users should be presented with organized external information that logically extends internal structured information.

Nowadays, the Web is a collection of information, and thus far there is no means to process this information. The Semantic Web (SW) offers a new foundation for organizing knowledge. It intends to provide access to heterogeneous and distributed information, thus enabling software applications to mediate between user needs and the information sources available. Another important topic today is making applications accessible through the Web as web services. One can combine web services together with the Semantic Web in order to achieve synergy. The ultimate vision of the Web is that of a distributed computational device. In order to make the device work, we need special web services capable of information processing. eKW could be one of such services employed to process knowledge, hence the word "knowledge" in the name. enhanced Knowledge Warehouse was modeled to conform to a new way of building applications, namely, the web services.

According to the requirements of the modeling framework, it was decomposed into the following independent services: Library Service (for storing documents and making them available to users), Profiling Service (for defining organization's long-term information needs extracted from information systems), Filtering Service (for selecting documents that match the long-term information needs), Indexing Service (for preparing semantic, temporal, and spatial indexes of documents), and Reporting Service (for retrieving documents relevant to the temporary user needs.)

The main role of eKW in the Semantic Web is mediation. The concept of mediation was developed in heterogeneous and distributed information systems. eKW is a kind of data mediator that employs ontologies as a conceptualization layer. It allows mediation between internal management information systems and the Web. Ontologies, and business ontologies in particular, are with no doubt, the most important structures developed within eKW. The necessary mediation between different information systems could be then carried out based on the ontologies. The use of ontologies would also allow better representation of user information needs. The main contribution of eKW will be the means to match documents with user information needs in terms of different contexts; i.e. corporate knowledge, semantic, temporal, spatial, and personal.

The Distance Learning Platform

The D-Leap research Project, carried out at the Department of Management Information Systems, focuses on creating goal oriented e-learning management system. The system incorporates e-marketplace technology in order to serve as a knowledge e-marketplace for dispersed buyers and sellers. We put forward a solution for integrating business mechanisms (such as supply and demand analyses), telemetric, document management, skill management and e-learning tools. The prototype solution utilizes state-of-the-art web portal technology and digital assets management system to provide consistent, common platform for system users to work, communicate, and share knowledge. It is currently used as a document repository for all electronic materials used in didactic processes, a platform supporting creation of research papers, and a tool used in day-to-day teaching. Both system components (that are implemented as web services) and data structures support collaboration between the users. The platform is aimed at sharing knowledge regardless of the topic this knowledge concerns. The system is also a test platform for implementing topic maps and skill maps for knowledge management purposes. These are designed to reflect on the one side users' skills and demand for knowledge and on the other - system competences. The amalgam of the two increases effectiveness of learning.

SEMIRAMIDA: Semantic Models of Risk Description for Insurances

The general aim of SEMIRAMIDA project is to propose methods of incorporation of semantic technologies into risk representation based information systems as well as overall insurance industry.

Project objectives:

• Elaboration of methods for extraction and agregation of knowledge on risks
• Creation of model enabling the usage of knowledge in order to compute the standard risk measures
• Elaboration of semantic risk framework for insurance domain
• Representation of legal framework for underwriting and insrance legal documents
• Systematization of knowledge about risk influencing factors
• Incorporation of elasticity and interoperability into insurance information systems