News Story

NeOn kicks off in Rome

Jane Whild, Thursday 30 Mar 2006

The NeOn project kicked off in Rome on 20th March with a three-day meeting hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Project Coordinator, Enrico Motta, hailed the event as an excellent start to the project, with the team being highly motivated to achieve their goals.

NeOn, Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies, is an Integrated Project (IP), financed by the 6th Framework Programme of the EU. The projects budget is 14.7M, with the European Commission providing a 10.2 million grant. The Open Universitys Knowledge Media Institute is the coordinating partner, while the rest of the consortium includes European universities, businesses and user organizations collaborating in the project.

The research institutions include world-leading groups in the field of ontologies, collaborative technologies, context management and human-computer interaction, such as The Open University and University of Sheffield from UK, Universities of Karlsruhe and Koblenz-Landau from Germany, University Polytechnic Madrid (UPM) from Spain, INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) from France, Josef Stefan Institute from Slovenia and National Research Council from Italy. The companies that participate in this project are Software AG, iSOCO, Ontoprise and Atos Origin sae. A not-for-profit organization (AECE) is providing the pharmaceutical know-how for the planned case studies, while an international organization (United Nations FAO) is contributing another case study in the agricultural-fisheries area.

The project aims to create an open infrastructure for a new generation of semantic applications.