ICONS home > Project Documents > D30
For a presentation of D28 and D30 click here (PowerPoint, 293KB).
This Management Report covers the second semester (out of 4) of the ICONS project. During this period, the consortium carried out significant work pertaining to the two major ICONS activities: research and development. The achieved project status fully justifies proceeding into the next semesters dominated mainly by the detailed design and prototype implementation in the third semester and the prototype thorough validation (carried out mainly in the course of development and deployment of an example application) in the fourth semester.
With respect to the research activities the consortium achieved meaningful progress in the area of the multiparadigm knowledge representation. Well-advanced reports [ICONS D07, ICONS D08, ICONS D09] address the selected issues pertaining to declarative, structural and procedural knowledge, respectively. [ICONS D10], in turn, searches for relationships within and among particular knowledge types. Another realm of research, the advanced graphic user interface, resulted in 2 important reports: [ICONS D11] presents the state of the art while [ICONS D12] provides foundations of the ICONS approach. Distribution, being ICONS' primary approach to performance and scalability problems, is amply addressed in the almost completed [ICONS D18] and [ICONS D19] reports. The above listed research work is either completed or advanced to the extent in which some preliminary design decisions were free of any risk.
With respect to the development activities the ICONS consortium reached the milestone M4: Acceptance of the ICONS architecture. The stage for the ICONS prototype implementation is set. The selected development software environments are identified and established. System is decomposed, identified modules' functionality is documented and cross-verified, all system interfaces are agreed upon and frozen in the architecture specification. The detailed implementation plan is formulated and accepted. The work resulted in a report series of engineering-like nature. [ICONS D14] provides comprehensive guidelines for a sound development process of the functionality presented in [ICONS D16]. [ICONS D17] imposes managerial constraints on the development process expressed in terms of goals, time and resources. Finally [ICONS D15] provides an inventory report of available compounding software modules.
As the ICONS example application will provide the ultimate proof of concept for the ICONS research and for the platform to be developed, some effort was put into initial specification of the ICONS application in order to anticipate possible risks. [ICONS D35] presents the conceptual design of the structural fund knowledge portal. The application, slightly changed with respect to what was initially proposed, is extremely promising and - more importantly - economically justified.
Dissemination work was carried out on an appropriate level for this stage of the project. Management covered every day technical co-ordination as well as more comprehensive leadership with respect to administrative and technical aspects. The major issues managed were reallocation of work among partners to optimally exploit their competencies and progress monitoring and corrective actions with respect to ICONS example application.