Looking backward to January 2002 (or even a year earlier, when the project proposal had been prepared) we can see the way we went through. We see that the efforts amounting to 400 person months of total value exceeding 3 mln Euro were well invested and brought excellent results.
The research achievements were not only validated and published on numerous conferences and workshops (78), in journals (12) and books (4), documented in the project deliverables (41 formal project reports, out of which 16 publicly available) but also elaborated up to the detailed design level and implemented within the ICONS knowledge intensive application platform. 19 modules were implemented from scratch or as an extension of the existing open source modules and contributed by partners. The modules cooperating with each other within the precisely engineered ICONS platform architecture provide a comprehensive set of generic services indispensable for development of any type of KM intensive application. The platform validated against the prototype of Structural Funds Project Knowledge Portal proved its viability. The first commercial application of individual modules (e.g. intelligent workflow engine, ontology manager, text categorization, content repository) were also successful (BIP, SUNPLAST and PIUM applications). The most impressive ICONS platform based application is this of European Exchange of Documents – Poland. This large system (20 ministries, 12 000 civil servants, 10 000 incoming documents a months, budget 500 000 EUR) implementation and deployment in such a strict time regime (the first increment December 2003 – March 2004) was possible only due to the fact that it did not start from the scratch but rather built upon services provided by the ICONS platform. The consortium has no doubt that the ICONS platform supported by the ICONS methodology will compete with the leaders in knowledge, content and workflow management systems in Europe and in the US.
The major concern is related to further industrialization of the Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal (SFP KP; the second major result of the ICONS project). The user-oriented assessment and other dissemination activities confirmed that the system is potentially of great importance for social and economic development of Poland and other accessing countries. Although many notable institutions expressed their interest and willingness to exploit the portal (acknowledged by 12 gathered letters of interest), we were not able to find any real investors. The most promising talks are still carried out with NOT (Polish Federation of Engineering Associations – NOT, http://not.org.pl/english/)and will be continued even after the project completion. The consortium is motivated as it can envisage the forthcoming benefits for national economics and the consortium itself.
The Third General Project Review took place in Warsaw at 10th of November, 2003. 9 deliverables, the prototype of the ICONS platform and the prototype of the Structural Funds (SF) Project Knowledge Portal were subject to the evaluation. For the first time the reviewers were able to see the working application and its knowledge management facilities. The reviewers appreciated the range and strength of the offered knowledge management mechanisms. The technological results developed in the last period and the implementation of previously researched solutions were evaluated as sound and of great potential to any knowledge intensive application. Their successful application in the SF realm provides a proof of concept for the ICONS challenges. The reviewers expressed their concern with respect to usability and user friendliness aspects of the demonstrator. Being aware of these deficiencies, common for this stage of application development, the consortium will implement reviewers' recommendations and will put appropriate resources for planned user-oriented usability experiments.
The project is definitely getting closer to its end. The innovative research work is completed, although evolving to take into account the results of its implementation and deployment. The platform design and implementation is completed as well and provided a convincing proof of concept for the underlying research. Satisfactory results are achieved with respect to the ICONS core modules (pertaining to content and knowledge management layers) as well as to user interface modules (pertaining to human computer interaction layer). The achieved implementation stage excludes any major technological risk associated with the ICONS platform. The design and implementation are continuously maintained to accommodate feedback coming from the exploitation. Indeed, development work of the ICONS demonstrator, Structural Funds Projects Knowledge Portal, revealed a number of deficiencies and improvement proposals of varying importance, which have been registered and are subject to the rigorous corrective and perfective maintenance process. While the validation outcomes of the demonstrator development can not be overestimated, the genuine benefits, following the portal exploitation, are still to come. The Structural Funds Projects Knowledge Portal addresses an important socio-economic problem of the unifying Europe, which is to obtain the highest possible number of high quality eligible project proposals meeting stringent Structural Funds criteria. Thanks to its advanced knowledge management facilities, supporting both routine work as well as highly intellectual and creative proposal preparation activities, SF portal will surely play a role of significant enabler in getting higher ratio of the proposals accepted.
Apart from normal publication activities, the ICONS dissemination and exploitation resulted in the first commercial benefits! First of all we successfully applied the ICONS enhanced workflow engine in some e-government and industrial portals. Secondly innovative ICONS knowledge management concepts turned out to be appreciated in the bid for Polish - European Commission electronic mail system for Polish Ministry of Scientific Research and Information Technology. These examples of early successful exploitation of ICONS results make the development team even more determined in further industrialisation and commercialisation of the achieved results.
Generally speaking, the progress is adequate to the 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).
Further plans In order to fully consume available resources in the light of very promising ICONS results the reviewers suggested project extension up to the end of April 2004. The consortium really appreciated and accepted this possibility aware of the fact that some of the activities, pertaining to publicity, dissemination and exploitation, need time (rather then intensive efforts) to be carried out effectively.
The consortium perceives the extension as an opportunity for better preparation of the achieved results for the further commercialization and exploitation. The special stress in the additional time will be devoted to:
At the beginning of March 2003 ICONS underwent the consecutive formal review. The second semester of the ICONS project (July - December 2002) has been positively evaluated. 14 reports and 2 milestones, results produced in the period form July 2002 to February 2003, were subjected to evaluation. The reviewers' evaluation varied from good to very good except for aspects related to the user interface, where some additional work is still needed.
In the period of interest most of the planned research work has been successfully completed. It is fully reflected in the formal definition of the multi paradigm knowledge schema covering structural aspects related to the processed content format, procedural aspects pertaining to workflow processes, and declarative aspects addressing knowledge modelling and inference capabilities.
A significant progress has been achieved with respect to the knowledge management platform being developed within ICONS, as well. The comprehensively defined architecture presents in detail the platform's services and technical solutions of the highest level of abstraction. The proposed technical process of further development has been accepted and the implementation plan has been confirmed as feasible. Altogether, this work constitutes the base for achievement of the consecutive milestone pertaining to ICONS architecture [ICONS D16].
As the project came into its second half more and more attention (in compliance with the project plan) is put on the development of a demonstration application, the so-called Structural Funds Project Knowledge Portal. Its objective is to validate ICONS solutions and, more importantly, to address an important socio-economic problem of unifying Europe. The objective and scope of the ICONS demonstration application has been defined in the conceptual design document. The reviewers acknowledged the importance of the addressed challenge, which is to obtain the highest possible number of high quality eligible project proposals meeting given stringent project criteria. Moreover, the reviewers confirmed the adequacy of the ICONS knowledge management platform for the above stated objectives. The first version of the ICONS methodology has been accepted as well.
ICONS continues its work according to the project plan. Starting from January 2003 the major stress is put on the platform implementation (work distributed among 4 partners), completion of the research (mainly in optimisation of the distributed architecture) and final elaboration of the methodology. Some preliminary work is being done on Structural Funds Project Knowledge Portal, despite the fact that the rigorous development of the application is planned to start not earlier than the second semester of this year.
The next breakthrough will be the completion of the platform development and commencing the work on the platform based demonstration application development (July 2003). These results are to be reviewed in September 2003.
In the first weeks of 2003 the ICONS project completed work pertaining to the crucial aspects of ICONS architecture: knowledge representation constituting the principal platform for the ICONS prototype. Progress was achieved with respect to distribution constituting means to deal with performance and scalability issues. As a result, milestone M3: Formal definition of the multi-paradigm ICONS knowledge representation scheme has been reached. Its principal result is a knowledge representation scheme reconciling incompatibilities among different knowledge representation paradigms.
The project now continues its thirds semester with emphasis on implementation of the ICONS prototype according to what is planned in [ICONS D17] in order to allow the development of the Structural Fund Project Knowledge Portal in the next semester.
On 31 December 2002, the ICONS project closed its second semester. In this semester, the ICONS consortium reached the milestone M4: Acceptance of the ICONS architecture. This means that as for the development activities, the selected development software environments have been identified and established, the system is decomposed, identified modules’ functionality has been documented and cross-verified, all system interfaces have been agreed upon and frozen in the architecture specification, and a detailed implementation plan has been formulated and accepted.
With respect to the research activities the consortium achieved meaningful progress in the area of the multiparadigm knowledge representation and in the field of advanced graphic user interface
Also, some effort was put into the initial specification of the ICONS example application in order to anticipate possible risks.The application has been slightly changed with respect to what was initially proposed, but is promising and - more importantly - economically justified.
The ICONS project was presented on the Knowledge Management Europe 2002 conference in London, 13-15 November 2002.
ICONS representatives were present on the IST 2002 event, which took place in Copenhagen on 4-6 November 2002. The project was exhibited in a stand, and Witold Staniszkis (Rodan Systems, project coordinator) held a presentation entitled "The current status of Intelligent CONtent management System IST-2001-32429 ICONS".
On 2 July 2002, the first general project review took place in Brussels, Belgium. The first semester of the ICONS project (January 1 - July 1) has been positively evaluated by the reviewers, which means that the project can be continued. For more information on the project achievements in this first semester, we refer to the summary of the management report (D29) (see Project Documents > D29).
