FORTH Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH)
The Institute of Computer Science has had a relatively long history and recognized tradition, since its establishment in 1983, in conducting basic and applied research, developing applications and products, providing services, and playing a leading role in Greece and internationally, in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies. It is the top-rated research institute in Greece in the area of ICT, and represents Greece within the ERCIM network of European ICT institutes. The FORTH-ICS Information Systems (ISL) Laboratory combines expertise in knowledge representation and reasoning, database systems, net-centric information systems, and conceptual modelling. Its grand research challenge is to succeed in the transition from traditional information systems, such as information retrieval systems, database and workflow management systems, to semantically rich, large-scale, adaptive information systems. The activities of ISL are structured around (a) Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, (b) Web Data and Knowledge Integration and Adaptation, and (c) Service-Oriented Computing. ISL has many outstanding achievements in the Semantic Web area. ISL members have designed and implemented the Semantic Web Knowledge Middleware for supporting collaborative knowledge management in professional and educational settings. In addition, ISL conducts interdisciplinary research. In the area of e-culture, ISL members were leading in the development and maintenance of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and its standardization as ISO 21127 by ISO/TC46/SC4. Also, the Laboratory has a strong participation in the harmonization of the FRBRoo, a formal ontology intended to capture and represent the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information, with the CIDOC CRM. Finally, ISL conducts interdisciplinary work in e-science and ambient intelligence.
In the context of the CASPAR project, the ISL members, (a) formalized the notion of intelligibility (which is critical for preserving the meaning and the performability of various tasks over digital objects) using a dependency-centered model and implemented it using Semantic Web (SW) technologies, (b) developed an advanced platform for SW management with emphasis on tackling the evolution requirements of digital preservation, (c) extended the ISO standard CIDOC CRM to explicitly model digital objects and showed how it can be employed for modelling and querying the provenance of digital objects, and (d) developed tools for automating as much as possible the creation and curation of preservation metadata.
FORTH-ICS has a long experience in participating in EU and national projects. ISL is currently participating in the IST FP6 projects ACGT and KP-Lab, and the IST FP7 projects 3DCOFORM, PlugIT and the PlanetData NoE. ISL comprises 8 researchers and more than 20 members of technical staff.
