uucp@ucbvax.UUCP (07/11/84)
From: decvax!mcvax!ariadne!simon (Simon Gibbs)
The Institute of Computer Science in Heraklion is an active
participant in ESPRIT (the European Strategic Programme of
Research and Development in Information Technology). ESPRIT
is a 5 year programme commencing after a 1 year pilot phase
in fall 1984. The programme is comprised of projects of
precompetitive R&D belonging to 5 areas: advanced microelectronics,
software technology, advanced information processing, office
systems, and computer integrated manufacturing. A project is
undertaken by a group of partners which may include companies,
universities, and research institutes. The total ESPRIT
budget is ~1.5 billion ECU, in general 1/2 of a project's funding
comes from the EEC and 1/2 from it's partners. ESPRIT has 12
main industrial partners who are expected to participate,
they are:
GE(UK) CGE(F) Telefunken(D) Olivetti(I)
ICL(UK) Bull(F) Nixdorf(D) STET(I)
Plessy(UK) Thomson(F) Siemens(D) Philips(NL)
At the institute we are involved in 3 ESPRIT projects that were
begun in the pilot phase and will most likely be
continued for the full period. A proposal has also been made,
and it seems to have a good chance for succeeding, for a fourth
project to begin this fall. Each project is of the 50-100 man
year size and extended over 5 years. A short summary of the
projects, taken from their proposals, follows:
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ESPRIT Pilot Project
Workplan sub-area 4.4.1
Development of an Experimental Mixed-Mode Document Filing System
This project will develop a prototype of a file server
for office documents. The server will handle structured
objects consisting of text, image, audio and attribute data
(such objects are called "multimedia documents"). The
operations will include document type specification (in
which a particular structuring of components is identified),
document storage (which requires mapping the components to
physical storage), query processing (where the server
receives a query from a client and sends back the objects
satisfying the query) and operations on collections of docu-
ments (such as creating or deleting a collection, retrieving
a collection, and browsing through a collection).
The server will exist in a network environment contain-
ing user workstations, a high bandwidth communication facil-
ity, and special devices such as printers, scanners, and
OCR. Although the project is not directly aimed at these
components, they will be considered in determining the func-
tionality of the document server.
The prototype server will be implemented in an incre-
mental way: at the beginning of the project a first version
will be implemented as quickly as possible, dealing with
text and data only. This version will provide the basis for
subsequent extension with image-handling and voice-handling
functions.
Partners
Olivetti (I)
Instituto Elaborazione Informazione (I)
Cretan Research Centre, Institute of Computer Science (GR)
Mnemonica (GR)
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ESPRIT Pilot Project
Workplan sub-area 4.2.1
Intelligent Workstations
After a first phase, that lasted one year from Sep-
tember 1983 to September 1984, the project on Intelligent
Workstations will aim at the implementation of a complete
system including office workstations and servers connected
with a local network. The intelligence will reside in the
workstation and the servers. Cooperation between all the
components will take place in order to provide "Intelligent
Assistance" to the users in their problem solving activi-
ties. For this purpose the project is divided into five
different modules and will run during five years.
The first module is the assembly of the hardware pieces to
construct the workstation. Dedicated hardware such as
filtering mechanisms, that has been developed during the
first year, will be taken into account when necessary in the
workstation and/or servers. The hardware will be selected
from products available on the market.
The second module will be the operating system of the works-
tation. It will be network oriented, insure multitasking
and synchronisation with all the necessary mechanisms for
increasing the reliability of the distributed system.
The third module will be the implementation of the LISP
environment and knowledge representation system that has
been selected after the first year.
The forth module will focus on the layer of office system
tools that embed office semantics.
The fifth module will deal with concrete applications to be
implemented with the office system tools.
The sixth module will deal with the user interface, it will
be divided into three parts: natural language processing and
an author system; enhancing the user interface with mul-
timedia features (sound and image); defining and implement-
ing a conceptual model of the user interface.
The project will benefit from the very interesting
techniques of Artificial Intelligence to design an office
system that embeds on the one hand knowledge about office
procedures and organisation, and, on the other hand, the
necessary tools for a natural interface with the user
(natural language and multimedia). There is no product
today which provides all these features in the office arena.
The project will fulfill partially the goal of recently
advanced projects in the US and Japan (e.g., the 5G
project).
Partners
Bull Transac (F)
INRIA (F)
Vrije Universiteit (B)
Katholieke Univ. Nijmegen (NL)
Cretan Research Centre, Institute of Computer Science (GR)
OCE (NL)
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ESPRIT Pilot Project
Workplan sub-area 3.3
A Logic Oriented Approach to Knowledge and Data Bases
Supporting Natural User Interaction
This project aims at building a system allowing for a
natural dialogue between users and data and knowledge bases.
The system will consist of the following layers:
- A user/machine interface in natural language (German and
English) enriched with graphical facilities.
- A human oriented high level representation formalism based
on (an extension of) first order logic.
- A machine oriented formalism also based on logic but
intended for efficient reasoning.
- A "machine" integrating the data and knowledge stored in
the machine oriented formalism with the knowledge and data
stored in existing tools (data bases, application specific
tools).
To achieve this goal, it is intended:
- To develop a high level knowledge representation formalism
which combines features of knowledge net approaches, logic
approaches and advanced deductive mechanisms.
- To compare different methodologies of natural language
processing, to select the most appropriate one, to adapt it
to the developed high level knowledge representation formal-
ism and to enrich it with graphical facilities.
- To develop a logic based representation allowing for effi-
cient reasoning, to implement an execution mechanism based
on this formalism, to integrate this formalism with existing
tools (data bases, application specific tools) and to
develop an optimiser transforming the human oriented
representation into the machine oriented one.
- To test the effectiveness of the selected methods and
approaches by developing some applications. The considered
application domains are the querying of data bases (a subset
of the representation formalisms is expected to be suffi-
cient), the evaluation of commercial aircraft design con-
cepts, semantic data modelling and the use of robotic sys-
tems in a production environment.
Partners
Belgian Institute of Management SA (B)
Scicon Ltd (UK)
Scientific Control Systems GmbH (D)
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (D)
Cretan Research Centre, Institute of Computer Science (GR)
Subcontractors
Technical University of Munich (D)
Cranfield Institute of Technology (UK)
University of Hamburg (D)
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ESPRIT Main Project
Workplan sub-area 4.4.1
Development of an Optical Storage Based Retrieval System
for Multimedia Documents
This project aims to develop a server for the long term
mass storage of multimedia documents. The server would be
one component in an overall office information system and
would be dedicated to document archival. The project will
thus concentrate on developing a server with very large
storage capacity and will, in particular, investigate the
use of optical (i.e., laser) storage devices.
We can describe the functionality of the server in
terms of the objects handled and operations on these
objects. Regarding the first we require that the server
handle structured objects consisting of text, image, audio
and attribute data - we call such objects multimedia docu-
ments. Here text refers to arbitrary length character data,
image to either raster images or a representation based on
graphics primitives, audio to digitized (and possibly
compressed) voice, and attribute data to traditional numeric
or fixed-length character fields. Also we use "document" in
the general sense which includes such things as letters,
memos, forms, reports and so on.
The operations provided by the server include document
type specification, document archival, and query processing
and retrieval. In addition many of the other devices in the
overall office information system may provide services that
directly or indirectly involve the archive server. For
example a workstation can provide an interactive query for-
mulation program, special input devices (such as OCR and
facsimile) can generate documents for storage on the server,
and gateways can transform documents received from external
sources to the form understood by the archive server.
Partners
Philips Data Systems (NL)
Truimph Adler A.G. (D)
Battelle Institute e.V. (D)
Cretan Research Centre, Institute of Computer Science (GR)
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Regards from ariadne, Simon Gibbs