1. 3rd Balkan Conference in Informatics (BCI’2007) 27-29 September 2007, Sofia, Bulgaria Vladimir Alexiev, PhD CTO Sirma Solutions NESSI and SIRMA

2. Who is Sirma Group The largest Bulgarian-owned software company Established in 1992, 15 years of successful growth 250 staff, huge technology pool Own new office (built 2002) 15 Business units, including product companies, banking software, international IT consulting, system integration and outsourcing units

3. Who is Ontotext Ontotext is a research lab of Sirma Group and worldwide-leading developer of core semantic technology. Research areas: Ontology Management; Information Extraction and Retrieval (IE, IR); Semantic Web Services. Application domains: Web Mining, EAI, KM, BI, and Media Research. Ontotext is active in leading-edge semantic research, but unlike a typical research organization, it also embodies research results in production-quality software products. Ontotext is the developer of several outstanding products and major contributor to open- source platforms: KIM Platform: semantic search engine, using text analysis to provide hybrid queries involving structured data and inference. WSMO Studio: semantic web services (SWS) modeling environment. OWLIM: industrial-scale semantic database, using Semantic Web standards for inference and integration/consolidation of heterogeneous data. Wsmo4j:API and a reference implementation for building SWS. PROTON: light-weight general-purpose upper-level ontology defining about 300 classes and 100 properties. ORDI: Ontology Representation and Data Integration middleware, integrated with wsmo4j.

4. Ontotext and EU IST Bulgaria’s most successful participant in EU IST projects under the EU Framework Programs. Projects completed under FP5: On-To-Knowledge, inventor of OIL, www.ontoknowledge.org Ontology Middleware Module and DAML+OIL reasoner VISION, Towards Next Generation Knowledge Management, km.aifb.uni- karlsruhe.de/fzi/vision/ OntoWeb, Ontology-based information exchange, www.ontoweb.org. Applications to (knowledge management and electronic commerce), SWWS, Semantic Web enabled Web Services, swws.semanticweb.org. Comprehensive Web Service description framework; Web Service discovery; scalable Web Services mediation platform Other completed projects: COG, Corporate Ontology Grid, www.cogproject.org. Commercial applications of grid technology via ontological modeling to integrate corporate information. GATE, General Architecture for Text Engineering, www.gate.ac.uk SWAN, Semantic Web Annotator, deri.ie/projects/swan. Large Scale Annotation of human language for the Semantic Web

5. Projects completed under FP6: SEKT, Semantic Knowledge Technologies, sekt.semanticweb.org. Targeting a synergy of Ontology and Metadata Technology, Knowledge Discovery and Human Language Technology. DIP, Data, Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services, informatik.uibk.ac.at/infweb/meetings/dip InfraWebs, www.infrawebs.org, Intelligent Framework for Networked Businesses and Governments Using Semantic Web Services (SWS) and Multi- Agent-Systems Ontotext and EU IST

6. Ongoing FP6 projects: PrestoSpace, Preservation towards storage and access. www.prestospace.org. IST World, Knowledge Base for RTD competencies in IST, ist-world.dfki.de SUPER, Semantics Utilised for Process management within and between EnteRprises, www.ip-super.org RASCALLI, Responsive Artificial Situated Cognitive Agents Living and Learning on the Internet, www.ofai.at/rascalli. SemanticGov, Providing Integrated Public Services to Citizens at the National and Pan-European level with the use of Emerging Semantic Web Technologies. TAO, Transitioning Applications to Ontologies. How can existing 'legacy' applications migrate to open, semantic-based SOA. TripCom, Triple Space Communication. MediaCampaign, Discovering, inter-relating and navigating cross-media campaign knowledge. The total budget of these projects exceeds 90M EUR. Ontotext has won several FP7 projects as well

7. Sirma and NESSI Sirma is a member of the following working groups: Software Engineering Project Management, Requirements Engineering, Quality Assurance subgroup Semantic Technologies Business Process Management Small and Medium Enterprises Ontotext has already collaborated on EU FP projects with leading software vendors that participate in these working groups, such as IBM, SAP, Atos Origin, IDS Scheer. We’ve had very close collaborations with the leading members of the Semantic work-group. Sirma joined NESSI in 2006. The initiative came from Sirma Solutions: a unit that works on large projects for eGovernment, private companies, outsourcing. The idea was to intensify EU-funded research in more practically-oriented areas, such as efficient implementation of large e-Government systems, improving software engineering practices, etc.

8. Impact of NESSI Unfortunately, so far NESSI has had no impact on Sirma’s work and EU projects. All of our collaborations were established before or independently of NESSI. We have not participated in FP7 proposals initiated by NESSI. In our view: NESSI pursues a worthwhile research and application-oriented agenda (NESSI SRA and NEXOF). A number of work-groups are established, but the level of activity is low. The potential for collaboration is huge but not realized yet. Some very capable SMEs are NESSI members, but their capacities are under- utilized.