Emerge of new technologies has effected the way we do our business today. During the last decade, the World Wide Web has evolved into an essential medium for information, communications and business. The drawback of this success is the information overload in which the Information Explosion makes it difficult to access and use the information and services effectively.The main goal of BIM project is to integrate the usages of Semantic Web and related technologies into business information management to manage huge amount of surrounding information. It is proposed to store, manage and retrieve ones business information entities. It enables the acquisition and storage of data while giving annotations to email messages, browsed web pages, phone calls, images, contacts, life events and other resources. In the next step BIM will tackle the collaborative business systems and tries to unify the personal business information into group business information. It will also provide intuitive and effective search mechanism based upon stored semantics. This proposal presents the framework for the system to devise lifetime data store and search using recognized standards. We are aiming at a system which supports the long term memory by associating metadata with content and ontologies. The ultimate goal of our project is to build a Business Information Management system over a Human Lifetime using ontologies as a basis for the representation of its content.

Grid Computing Infrastructure Initiative for Austria

The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is growing in an alarming rate and the goals declared in the Kyoto protocol are far away. The role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is undoubted for reducing CO2 emissions. This role is recognized by scientific community, international bodies and national and international policy makers. The direct footprint of ICT amounts for 2%-3% of total global emissions and 10% of emissions in OECD-countries. ICT offers a huge energy efficiency potential across the economy and can deliver emissions savings up to 15%. As 75% of ICT footprint is due to its usage, optimization of usage is the area that must receive the most attention. ICT is a contributor to CO2 emissions and global warming but more importantly it is a key technology for fighting against global warming. The key enabling technology for achieving energy efficiency and resource optimization is Cloud computing which are centralized and highly scalable services that could lead to further capacity to virtualize or consolidate resources with breakthrough gains in energy efficiency. Underutilization is the main reason for energy inefficiency of current local solutions. Most of the servers are consuming energy but are utilized under 6%. In other words, the energy is consumed but 94% of resources are wasted. In public sector the situation is not different. According to Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the USA, federal servers are utilized about 7%. Even at a very low load the power consumed is about 50%-70% of the peak power. This utilization rate and subsequently the energy consumption can be improved significantly by Cloud technology. Imagine the energy saving of a single fully utilized server instead of 16 servers, each 6% utilized. Because of this impact the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has identified Cloud computing as a high priority research area. The international trend is also clear. More and more companies such as AOL, Starbucks, Canon and providers of renewable energy such as blueEnergy are turning to Cloud. One of the major application areas of Cloud technology is public sector. The Obama administration and other governments in Germany, Switzerland, UK, Japan, Taiwan and Korea as well some other countries have recognized this opportunity and are pushing the Cloud agenda forward, not only because of its cost saving potentials but also because of its impact on the environment. This potential has been recognized in Austria but unfortunately actual steps have not yet taken. Lacking actual steps means risk of losing technological competitiveness and the strategic markets of tomorrow. Public sector has requirements such as reliability, availability, business continuity and data security and therefore is a representative case for other sectors.In this project we envision to conduct a feasibility study for Cloud powered Austrian public sector in order to make the first steps in the right direction. The experiences and results from this project can be applied to other sectors such as finance and heath. The study will not only cover technical issues but also environmental, energy savings and cost reduction issues. This project will evaluate possible applications of Cloud computing in public sector, its costs, energy saving potentials and associated risks in addition to the technical issues. The results can be used as a basis for decision makers to make the right decision and choose the right technology.

EU FP6 Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries:The DELOS network, started in January 2004, intends to conduct a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research activities of the major European teams working in Digital Library - related areas with the goal of developing the next generation Digital Library technologies. The focus of our contributions are on Cluster 3: Audio/Visual and Non-Traditional Objects, as well as Cluster 6: Digital Preservation.

Collaboration of distributed knowledge communities is a rapidly increasing application field, e.g. international enterprises, scientific research teams, e-learning communities. For efficient collaboration the common understanding of information is a decisive factor.A systematic approach to gain this common understanding is the dynamic creation of ontologies, leading to a more efficient use of shared information resources.

Cyber attacks are serious threats for organizations and entire nations. The protection of thecritical infrastructure in Austria depends on (i) the IT awareness, and (ii) the adequateimplementation of IT security measures in private, commercial, and governmentalenvironments. This project aims at: (i) measuring the IT awareness and already implementedIT security measures at Austrian citizens, companies, and governmental institutions, (ii) thedevelopment of a catalog of measures to raise the national IT awareness level and enforcenational IT security measures, and (iii) evaluating the catalog of measures regarding theAustrian data protection legislation. The project results enable the protection of the criticalinfrastructure in Austria by measures which are compliant to the Austrian data protectionlegislation.

EU FP6 Network of Excellence on Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation, and Learning:The MUSCLE network, started in March 2004, aims at creating and supporting a pan-European Network of Excellence to foster close collaboration between research groups in multimedia datamining on the one hand and machine learning on the other. The focus of our contribution lies particulalrly in the field of Single Modality Processing, particulalry in the fields of text and audio analysis.

Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Tools.Benchmark-based Evaluation of a set of Named-Entity Recognition Tools with respect to qualitative performance and throughput.

e-Health by definition requires the sharing of patient related datawhen and where necessary. Electronic health records (EHR) promise toimprove communication between health care providers, thus leading tobetter quality of patients'treatment and reduced costs. As highlysensitive patient information provides a promising goal forattackers and is also demanded by insurance companies and employers,there is an increasing social and political pressure regarding theprevention of health data misuse. Within this project we develop ---based on our patent --- the new system PIPE (Pseudonymization ofInformation for Privacy in e-Health). It differs from existingapproaches in its ability to securely integrate primary andsecondary usage of health data. The aim of this project is (a) tobroaden our patented approach to support (semi-)structured metadata, (b) to develop alternative secure storage and retrievaltechniques, (c) to provide for secure storage and access to medicalemergency data, (d) to provide a secure viewer that preventsman-in-the-middle attacks, and (e) to demonstrate our system in thecontext of genome analysis, storage, and retrieval.

E-health requires the sharing of patient-related data when and where necessary. Electronic health records (EHR) promise to improve communication between health care providers, thus improving the quality of patients'treatment and reducing costs. EHRs allow the structured and expandable collection of medical data needed for clinical research studies and thereby not only enable the optimization of clinical studies, but also results in higher statistical significance due to a larger number of samples. While the digitization of medical data and the organization of this data within EHRs have been introduced in some areas, massive amounts of paper-based health records are still produced on a daily basis. This data has to be stored for 30 years for legal reasons but is of no benefit for research organizations, as the unstructured medical data in paper-based health records cannot be efficiently used for clinical studies. Furthermore, legal regulations prohibit the use of documents containing both personal and medical data for clinical studies, which leads to expensive data acquisition phases and limited samples.This project develops a system for the recognition and pseudonymization of personal data in paper-based health records with the overall goal to (i) provide clinical studies with medical data gained from existing paper-based health records while (ii) ensuring patients'privacy by pseudonymizing the (digitized) data. The product integrates unique methods for (i) automatically identifying personal and medical data, (ii) automatically annotating the optical character recognition (OCR) output data of paper-based health records with standard-compliant metadata, and (iii) automatically pseudonymizing the personal data. With the project results, (Austrian) health care organizations profit by (i) strengthen clinical research resulting in faster and more reliable results and reduced costs, and (ii) providing an environment of trust for its patients and employees that guarantees privacy.