The project consortium consists of 5 partners from 4 differnt countries as follows:
punkt. netServices GmbH (lead partner), Austria
punkt.netServices was founded in 2000 and is a specialised software company which offers expertise in the areas of conception, implementation and maintenance of web based information- & knowledge management software systems.
PUNKT’s focus lies on enterprise 2.0 projects, web-based information management systems & community environments as well as on web-based (semantic web) components and web-services and on intelligent search mechanism by means of ontologies (topic maps / thesauri). The focus of PUNKT’s research and development activities lies on web-based semantic components and in the fields of knowledge – & information management as well as on content management itself.
The customer base of PUNKT consists of international medium to large sized enterprises in various fields of industry and administration (e. g. Sony, Sun Microsystems, mobilkom Austria, EU Water Initiative, City of Vienna) as well as in the area of (online) media ( e.g. Bronner Online AG – derStandard.at; Austrian Press Agency APA; TeleKurier Vienna). Through a network of qualified industrial (e. g. Atlassian Sydney – San Franciso – Amsterdam, IntraFind Munich, ParsGroup Vienna) and scientific partners (e. g. Fraunhofer Berlin, University St. Gallen, Salzburg Research, University of Leipzig) PUNKT ensures its competitive edge and complements its market offerings by diverse industry-specific solutions. The company relies on an interdisciplinary team of business economists, natural scientists and humanists with extensive experience in planning and implementing complex (information management) projects.
In 2005 PUNKT founded an associated company – the Semantic Web Company (SWC) with the aim to narrow the gap between industry and academia, R&D in semantic systems and to accelerate the time to market process of Semantic Web technologies. In order to achieve this goal services and instruments are: consulting, R&D projects and transfer. Customers of the SWC are e. g. UNIQA Insurance Company, Austrian Energy & Environment (AEE), Multi-M Hamburg, Raiffeisen IT Services).
Institut for Applied Informatics (InFAI), Germany
The Institute for Applied Informatics (InFAI) is associated with the Computer Science and Business faculties at University of Leipzig and bundles the competencies of 7 university chairs, outside investors and various industrial partners. Its research areas include Service Science, Software Engineering, Knowledge Management as well as Semantic Web technologies as a foundation to enable collaboration in distributed, loosely-coupled collaboration settings. A special focus of this research lies in the combination of Social Web and Web 2.0 approaches with the Semantic Web paradigm. The InFAI team currently consists of 30 researchers and PhD students as well as more than 50 student research assistants, interns and bachelor and master students.
The research group Adaptive Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at InFAI, which participates in this project, works on projects related to ontology creation and manipulation, knowledge extraction, ontology learning and information & data integration on the Semantic Web. Besides establishing theoretical results particular emphasis is given to scalable implementations for the field. The group currently consists of 10 researchers and PhD students as well as numerous student assistants, bachelor and master students. Alumni of AKSW will be a valuable employee source for the collaborating SMEs.
AKSW works on publicly as well as industrially funded research projects, in particular BmbF funded project SoftWiki, EU FP7 funded project OntoWiki and SenterNovem funded project Vakantieland. Open-source software and large outreach community projects conducted by AKSW include the semantic wiki system OntoWiki, the DBpedia project, the Web application semantification software Triplify and the open-source idea and resource pooling platform Cofundos. In 2007 AKSW hosted the first Conference on Social Semantic Web in Leipzig. AKSW is involved in the organization of numerous events and collaborates with a worlswide network of scientific and industrial partners.
OpenLink Software Ltd, UK
OpenLink Software is a leading provider of universal data access middleware. Its products include a suite of high-performance data access drivers for ODBC, JDBC and ADO.NET, the Virtuoso Hybrid Data Server for SQL, XML, and RDF, and the OpenLink Data Spaces suite of distributed collaborative applications. OpenLink has extensive experience in scalable triple stores by extending its native Virtuoso database / SQL engine incorporate SPARQL query processing. Virtuoso offers both a native triple store and RDF middleware in a single product offering. It offers management and creation of physical and virtual triples in conjunctions with the ability to declaratively produce RDF views of SQL Data (SQL to RDF mapping).
The OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) application suite offers an integrated platform for managing and integrating blogs, wikis, RSS / Atom feeds, discussion forums and more. Naturally, all these applications are SIOC, SKOS, FOAF, and AtomOWL enabled. OpenLink has hands on experience at both the applications and data management levels within the Semantic Web technology realm.
OpenLink is a W3C member, having participated in the DAWG, SWEO, RDB2RDF activities, , a key member of the Linking Open Data community, and timeless supporter of the Open Data Movement. OpenLink presently hosts the DBpedia service and provider of platform technology for large biomedical data sets such as Neurocommons and Bio2RDF.
OpenLink Group Ltd. is an SME established in the United Kingdom in 1992 and has a business development and sales subsidiary in the United States. Most product development takes place within the EU, including the UK, Netherlands and Bulgaria.
Since its inception OpenLink has built up large pool of local and international customers from small to large enterprises, which includes companies like Motorola, GE Captial Services, Barclays Bank, Ing Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Lucent, Scottish Executive, Bradford Council and many more.
OpenLink’s core competency is in standards-based data access in all its aspects, from database drivers to databases and heterogeneous database federation. OpenLink’s expertise in developing high performance DBMS technology makes the company well adapted to leading WP4.
The company can draw on its experience in data storage and query processing in both SQL and SPARQL realms. OpenLink is a software vendor with existing SQL and SPARQL products, hence new technology developed in SCMS has a natural exploitation route through inclusion in company products.
Digital Trowel, Israel
Digital Trowel, Israel (DT) LTD is an Israeli company specializing in providing sophisticated NLP based solutions to large corporations. DT has 27 researchers and programmers that are highly proficient in text mining, information extraction and social network analysis techniques.
DT customers include Dun & Bradstreet and Standard & Poor’s. DT has developed tools for performing the following tasks: Named Entity Recognition, Document Classification, Interactive Document Clustering, Multi Lingual Term Extraction, Visual Capabilities to display and explore large networks, and programmable crawlers. Most of our programmers have over 15 years of experience with Java, C++, C#, .net and significant experience in implementing dedicated search engines, machine learning algorithms and data mining algorithms.
Recent DT projects evolved around mining blogs, mining user forums, mining news streams and analyzing SEC/EDGAR reports.
netresearch, Germany
Netresearch is a fast growing, specialised software company which offers expertise in the areas of conception, implementation and maintenance of the open source CMS TYPO3 an PHP based Web applications especially for customers in the eCommerce and tourism branches. Netresearch’s custom-developed TYPO3 based business solutions are used as internet-, intranet- and extranet- applications.
The customer base of Netresearch consists of international medium to large-sized enterprises in various fields of industry and administration especially eCommerce, automotive and tourism such as AIDA Cruises, T-Systems, Dell, BMW, Daimler Chrysler, Lintec AG, Midewa.
Netresearch is highly committed to promote open-source software. For example Netresearch organizes the “TYPO3 Anwendertage” with a steady growing number of participants (for instance, more than 100 in 2007). Netresearch is member of the TYPO3 Association and member of the board of ”Cluster IT Mitteldeutschland” – a cluster of an industrial initiative for central Germany.
Netresearch´s interdisciplinary team consists of computer scientists, engineers and lawyers with extensive experience in planning and implementing complex projects. In addition to its full-time employees (which are planned to increase significantly within the next years) Netresearch works with a network of partnering companies and freelancers.
