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This Management Report covers the third semester (out of 4) of the ICONS project. During this period, the consortium carried out significant work pertaining mainly to ICONS platform development and, to less extent, research. Generally the progress is adequate to amount of resources spent, appropriate with respect to the initial project plan and satisfactory with respect to the task assigned for the last semester (the ICONS prototype thorough validation carried out mainly in the course of development and deployment of a pilot application).
The research work is almost completed. Work on Multiparadigm Knowledge Representation (WP2) has been completed and the corresponding milestone has been achieved. The principal result of the milestone (M3 - Formal definition of the multi-paradigm ICONS knowledge representation scheme) is a knowledge representation scheme reconciling incompatibilities among different knowledge representation paradigms (structural, procedural and declarative). Selected problems pertaining to particular types of knowledge are amply presented in reports [ICONS D07, ICONS D08, ICONS D09]. The ICONS integrated knowledge schema is presented in [ICONS D10].
Workpackage Distributed Content Repository resulted with [ICONS D18] and [ICONS D19]. The first report presents SDDS (Scalable Distributed Data Storage) and selected aspects of optimisation of storage and processing loads while the second addresses aspects of load balancing and failover in J2EE application servers as well as asynchronous services processing.
Implementation of the ICONS platform (precisely specified in [ICONS D16] in the sense of requirements and [ICONS D14] in the sense of development process), although not thoroughly completed, is well advanced and sufficient for commencement of the Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal development. Significant progress has been achieved with respect to ICONS core modules (pertaining to content ad knowledge management layers WP6) as well as to user interface modules (pertaining to human computer interaction layer WP3). Several integration points have been carried out to ensure final smooth co-operation of modules contributed by different partners. Current state of implementation excludes any major technological risk associated with the ICONS platform within the defined scope of development.
Work on Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal development started at the beginning of April 2003. The initial stress was put on real data collection and refinement of [ICONS D35] (Conceptual design) as well as on the technical design [ICONS D36]. Some preliminary implementation work has been done. At the time being, the benefit from the application development can not be overestimated. It covers the real verification of the platform effectiveness and expressiveness from the application programmer’s standpoint. A number of significant deficiencies and improvement proposals have been identified – all of them secured in the project bug tracker are subject for corrective and perfective maintenance. The most tangible result of the development is the proposal preparation workflow that constitutes a “business” skeleton of application under development. The first version of ICONS methodology [ICONS D25] has been completed. It will be verified during Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal development, refined and issued as a next version accommodating all the gathered observations.
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 dealing with administrative and technical aspects. Note. That this report partially covers [ICONS D28] presented to the reviewers on the March 2003 review. The redundancy was introduced for the completeness purposes (managerial reports present detailed progress information in consecutive semesters while progress reports deliver information on intermediate results).