WISE - World Wide Information System for R&D; Efforts
Fritz Loseries
Wilhelminenstr. 7
D-64283 Darmstadt
Phone: +49-6151-155138
Fax: +49-6151-155199
loseries@igd.fhg.de
Veronika Samara
INTRACOM S.A.
Hellenic Telecommunications and Electronics Industry
Marcopoulou Ave., P.O. Box 68
GR-19002 Peania Attika, Greece
Phone: +30-1-6860854
Fax: +30-1-6860312
vsam@intranet.gr
Bodo Urban
Fraunhofer Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung
Außenstelle Rostock
Joachim-Jungius-Str. 9
D-18059 Rostock
Phone: +49-381-4024119
Fax: +49-381-4024199
urban@egd.igd.fhg.de
- Keywords:
- R&D; reports, partnership search, call for proposals, Forms, Perl, Index searching, resource discovery, mirroring, WISE, European Commission, WYSIWYG
WISE, "World wide Information Support for R&D Efforts" is a project funded
by the European Commission, Directorate General XIII-B. WISE started in January
1994 and ended in December 1994. Its main objective is to link research communities and small- and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), especially from less favoured regions of the
European Union, to other communities in Europe, providing European wide access
to distributed information. The intention of WISE is to inform about R&D
activities.
WISE addresses the following objectives:
- Support of an effective and wide dissemination of R&D information
- Provision for modern interactive communication facilities, especially
for a stronger integration of SMEs and R&D sites in the less favoured
regions of the EU
- Representation of an entry point for accessing most information services
of the CEC on the Internet (e.g. ECHO, CORDIS, RACE, RARE, EARN, RIPE, ECRC,
Agora) and informing about other information services (e.g. ARCADE, VALUE).
- Stimulation of joint R&D and encouragement of communication with the
European Commission within the Fourth Framework (1994-1998)
- Improvement of the facilities of technology transfer
Within the White Book of Jacques Delors, the former Head of the European
Commission, the major objectives are based on the aspects of employment,
competitiveness and growth. Especially in rural areas and less favoured
regions, those aspects are still a deficiency. Therefore, the action plan of
the Bangemann Group is intending to use advanced communication technologies and
services for reaching these objectives. The objectives within WISE can be seen
as a preliminary step.
To gain its main objective the project partners of WISE decided to use the
World Wide Web which at the decision time was still not well known in most
areas in Europe. At that time about 250 WWW servers were existing. But it was
already known, that the underlying wide-area network for the World Wide Web,
the Internet, is the largest computer network in the world with over 30 million
users, and that the WWW is currently the most sophisticated and advanced
networked information system for discovery, retrieval, and collaboration.
Already at that time some drawbacks by using the WWW in its pure form had been
discovered. Those are the resource discovery, the availability and reachability
of servers from everywhere in Europe, the transfer cost and the information
content.
The growth of WWW servers is exploding. In December 1994 more than 11000
servers were counted. It seems, that getting informed about research activities
is one important issue. This is also valid for the research activities
supported by the European Commission. The question is "How to discover those
services?" - WISE gives an answer.
The European Commission intends to expand to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
The network connections to CEE, and also to the less favoured regions of the
European Union - Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and the "Fünf Neue
Länder"of Germany - are not very stable. For this reason but also for
minimizing transfer cost, a mirroring concept and a network setup of WISE
servers have been developed, to support the awareness of these servers and the
availability of services for SMEs, as well as research institutions in the less
favoured regions and the CEE. A concept of WISE Relay Centres has been
established.
Approach
The WISE objectives are achieved by
- Building up a widely spread information base which gives access
to R&D activities of the CEC, e.g. R&D programmes, Calls for Tender,
information from EU-databases, as well as national and regional subsidy
possibilities and results from R&D projects
- Installing local Relay Centres as gateways to the WISE service
The Relay Centres have the following tasks:
- Dissemination of information about the concept and the possibilities of
the WISE project
- To run a regional WISE server (WWW-server with WISE Information Board)
- To run telecommunication installations (telephone lines with modems and
ISDN lines) during the field trial to enable enterprises and R&D sites
which do not have their own Internet connection, to have access to the WISE
Information Board, using public telecommunications facilities
- Provision for free or cheap WWW client software
- Support of the installation and use of this software
- Provision for authoring tools (HTML-editors) and text converters to
create own HTML-documents which can be integrated into the WISE Information
Board
- Organization of tutorials and seminars for WISE, WWW and HTML
Achievements in 1994
In April 1994 the WISE Information Board was set up as the first server giving
an overview of the different known information services of R&D activities
in the EC. Among others it contains information about:
- European R&D results
- Current EU research programmes
- Calls for proposals and instructions, like "how to make a
proposal"
- Research intentions of SMEs, research institutes, as well as R&D
departments of large-sized enterprises
- Partnership search facilities
- Information of regional interest
The main WISE server in Darmstadt can be reached via the following uniform
resource locator: http://www.igd.fhg.de/wise/
In January 1995 the number of hits per day - including the weekends - has been
in average 450, with a high score of 819.
In the scope of the WISE project, Relay Centres are installed at IGD/R in
Rostock, Germany, at CCG/ZGDV in Coimbra, Portugal, and at INTRACOM S.A. in
Peania, Attika, Greece. Within a field trial these Relay Centres are acting as
a gateway offering modem and ISDN access to the WISE Information board for SMEs
and research organizations.
For improving the access to the WISE Information Board, in addition to the
WISE Relay Centres, a network of WISE mirrored servers has been established and
a mirroring concept for guaranteeing the up-to-date information on any server
has been developed.
To introduce the project the Relay Centres organized WISE Information Days and
tutorials for the usage of the WWW. Documents for the usage of WWW, HTML and
Internet were supplied. The information brochure "Using the World Wide Web for
European Research Co-operation", disseminated by DGXIII-B2, has been provided.
This contains, among other things, information about the WISE Information
Board, how to access it, and a cost estimation for the Internet access in less
favoured regions of the EU. Furthermore, all main project deliverables are
available via the WISE Information Board.
Technical development and evaluation
A selection of the most well known public domain HTML editors, HTML converters,
WWW servers and clients for different platforms has been collected and
evaluated.
For improving the existing tools for editing, browsing and retrieving HTML
documents and WWW structures enhancements were developed. For improving the
retrieval facilities the index searching mechanism ICE, and for improving the
editing phase a prototype of a WYSIWYG-HTML-Editor was
developed.
Examples of online forms for a partnership search based on the CORDIS and KoWi
sheets were developed with an automatic send mechanism. These examples are
illustrating the power of the WWW for corresponding in an easy and fast way
between the user and the information provider.
References
- J. Bund, etal:
- "Operational Model for the Relay Centres in the less favoured regions of the EU", May 1994
- J. Bund, etal:
- "Training Manual for the Relay Centre Operating Staff", August 1994
- M. Dönszelmann, F. Loseries, etal:
- "WISE - Using the World Wide Web for European Research Co-operation" - A User Manual, October 1994
- M. Dönszelmann, etal:
- "Installation Manual for the WISE Relay Centres", December 1994
- In preparation
- F. Loseries, etal:
- "WISE Final Report"