D05: Technological Base for the ICONS Project

Information about the document:

Project Number: IST-2001-32429
Project Acronym: ICONS
Title: Technological base for the ICONS project
Deliverable No.: D05
Due date: 30.06.02
Delivery Date: 30.06.02
Partners owning: Rodan
Partners contributed: InfoVide, SEMA, CIES, DAUPHINE
Made available to: Internal circulation within project (and Commission Project Officer + reviewers if requested)

Presentation of Document

For a presentation click here (PowerPoint, 116KB).

Short Description:

This report supports the integration strategy of developing a complete ICONS prototype by combining existing, existing to be expanded, and newly developed modules to provide building blocks for the ICONS architecture. The chosen approach is to keep the ICONS project scope under control and to ensure research and development results that add value to the selected technological fields representing the project focus. The goal is to design the ICONS software platform that includes the project research results with a minimum of software development effort.

The preliminary architecture of the ICONS prototype, that guided this review, is presented in [ICONS D01] (Project Presentation). The primary premise for the review was the observation that two out of five low-level technological areas as introduced in the ICONS architecture, namely Development Technologies and Content Management Technologies, seemed to comprise various software solutions that are potentially reusable during the ICONS prototype development. Hence the objective of this report was identification and initial evaluation of available, ready to use software components.

The following sources of solutions were taken into account during the review (in increasing order of focus):

commercial solutions (interesting as usually very mature with vast functionality but without possibility of modification and expensive),
open-source solutions (interesting as sometimes with quite vast functionality, for free and fully maintainable but causing some integration risks),
commercial solutions contributed by project partners (interesting as quite mature with significant functionality, fully maintainable, perfectly recognised by at least one partner, available for free in the consortium).

Taking licensing costs into account follows from two premises. First of all, the ICONS project has no specific budget for the licensing. Secondly and even more importantly, building the ICONS prototype upon the expensive platform will result in the high costs of the prototype-based target ICONS product, that in turn can decrease its competitiveness. Therefore, the trade-off quality / price is made for the very beginning of the prototype construction.

The report is the result of a comprehensive review carried out by partners having significant experience in the particular technological areas. The report provides:

succinct description of the modules reviewed (42 software modules have been documented; the size of the description was formally limited as we didn't want the report to be full of texts copied from the modules documentation but rather to focus on identification and evaluation purposes),
initial selection of the modules for further integration (22 modules have been selected as candidate modules for either complete or partial reuse),
definition of the preliminary ICONS architecture (concrete modules have been assigned to previously identified abstract modules).

The achieved results of this report corresponding to task T1.2 (Analysis of the eligible software tools and environments) go much beyond what is presented in the report. The most important achievement is the developers' familiarity with, knowledge of and recognition of software modules that are to be exploited in the further development process.

Although the report gives some initial selection of software modules that are to be exploited in the target ICONS prototype, the decisions cannot be treated as final. The review was based on documentation studies and it might happen that an appealing software module will turn out to possess some major drawbacks, either in the development / integration phase or in the deployment / usage phase. Therefore the selected modules will be further studied during preparation of the ICONS architecture [ICONS D16] and development environment [ICONS D14] and in even more detail during the initial software integration tasks.