[Translate to English:] Berlin 19. July 2007 - The THESEUS consortium is delighted with the EU Commission's decision to approve public funding of the THESEUS research programme by the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, or BMWi for short). The programme is set to run for 5 years and will receive some € 90 million of public money from the BMWi. The portion set aside for research and development will be divided equally between the fields of science and industry. A further € 90 million will come from participants from the industrial and research sectors, so that a total of around € 180 million will be invested in a considerable number of forward-looking research projects.
In the course of the next few weeks and months, 30 different companies, research establishments and universities will be embarking on a wide variety of exciting research products aimed at developing user-oriented basic technology applications and technical standards for a new internet-based knowledge-sharing infrastructure. Consortium members from the industrial sector will develop prototypes of the new technologies and test them in 7 application scenarios. The purpose of the tests is to find short-term ways of converting the technological advances into innovative tools, commercially-viable services and potentially profitable business models for the World Wide Web.
The THESEUS consortium is coordinated by empolis GmbH, a subsidiary of arvato AG. Siemens, SAP, empolis, Lycos Europe, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Deutsche Thomson oHG, intelligent views, m2any, Moresophy, Ontoprise, Festo, the German Mechanical Engineering Federation VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen und Anlagenbau) and the Institute for Broadcasting Technology IRT are just some of the members of the Consortium, whose work is distinguished by its promotion of close collaboration between industry's research and development departments and research bodies from the public sector; among these are, for example, internationally recognised experts from the DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence), the FZI (Research Center for Information Technologies), Munich's LMU (Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität) and TU(Technische Universität), the TU Darmstadt, the Technical University (TH) of Karlsruhe, the TU Dresden and the University of Erlangen. Nine member institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are also involved.
The research programme focuses closely on forms of semantic technology that are capable of recognising and classifying the content and meaning of information (words, pictures or sounds). With the aid of this technology, smart computer programmes are able to understand and replicate the context in which data is used and processed. By applying rules and classification principles, computers can also draw logical conclusions from content, and subsequently recognise and construct links between various items of information from diverse sources. In future, internet users will be able to apply the standards and basic technologies ("semantic toolboxes") developed by THESEUS when they want to create or process content, rules and classification systems themselves, or to process, collect and link content from different media along "smart" lines. In combination with semantic methods of this kind, the Web 2.0 we know today - with its principles of transparent, open, interactive social networking - will become the internet of tomorrow.
Some of the basic technologies being developed by the research partners are functions for the automatic creation of metadata for audio, video, 3D and picture files, and mechanisms for the semantic processing of multimedia documents and their associated services. Research is also being carried out on the development of tools for the management of ontologies, and of new machine learning algorithms and dialogue processing systems that can assess an individual situation and then take this assessment into consideration. At the same time, work on innovative user interfaces is in progress, as well as on new DRM procedures intended to provide better protection for the holders of intellectual property and marketing rights to multimedia content.
The members of the consortium have reacted very positively to the EU Commission's decision:
Hartmut Ostrowski, Chairman of the Board at arvato AG, says: "This project is the beginning of the development of a new internet generation. We will combine forces and innovative capacities in a joint effort to pave the way for the service and knowledge society of tomorrow".
According to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Jörg Bullinger, President of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, "it is impossible to make sensible use of the rapidly increasing quantity of information from all areas without the help of technical knowledge management systems. THESEUS responds to this fundamental challenge set by the knowledge society: it is developing innovative tools and solutions for collecting, processing and linking the knowledge that is already available, as well as for acquiring new knowledge. This large and ambitious research project will allow us and our partners from the world of industry to give a strong boost to IT and communications research in Germany".
Prof. Dr. Henning Kagermann, CEO at SAP, states that "THESEUS provides an important basis for the next internet generation, namely the service internet. The general public and clients now have expectations and requirements that demand business model solutions that rely on knowledge-based and IT-based services. So the research programme provides an ideal opportunity to secure a competitive advantage for IT and communication technology in Europe, and particularly Germany". Dr. Hartmut Raffler, Vice President Corporate Technology at Siemens, says that "THESEUS allows all internet users easy access to global knowledge. The semantic technologies being developed in the course of the THESEUS project will make it possible to generate new knowledge from knowledge that is already available, and so THESEUS represents a vital contribution to the creation of the knowledge society of tomorrow".
According to Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster, Head of the DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence), "THESEUS is a combination of the IT trends "Semantic Web" and "Web 2.0" which, in the form of Web 3.0, will provide an innovative, groundbreaking knowledge infrastructure that will allow entirely new forms of knowledge access, knowledge management and web-based services, applications and business models".
For more information about the THESEUS research programme and the planned application scenarios, go to www.theseus-programm.de.
Press contact:
Thomas Huber
Sprecher des Konsortiums
Telefon: +49 · 30 · 20 92 41 43
Thomas.Huber[aet]theseus-programm.de
