Telematics for Research
The first call for proposals for the Community's specific RTD programme in the field of telematics applications of common interest (1994-1998) was published in December 1994 (OJ No C 357 of 15.12.1994). Sectors open for proposals under this call included, among others, the "Telematics for research" sector, the twin goals of which are: - To develop advanced telematics application that will help researchers work together regardless of their geographic location; - To help researchers and others to access research results more easily. A total of 52 proposals for projects were received under this sector, of which 12 were selected for financing (Budget: ECU 26 million). These are as follows: - DESIRE: Establishment of an integrated multimedia information service on the European part of the Internet by using existing tools, and adding to these where necessary. Management and quality assurance will be given special attention; - MERCI: Aims to integrate technology components to allow for proper development of the tools for multimedia collaboration. These components will be demonstrated and made available to other proposals in order to be validated in concrete user environments. The proposal is based on the results coming from the earlier Community-funded MICE project; - MANICORAL: Aims to demonstrate the benefits of CSCW tools for making research more effective. The proposal intends to demonstrate more effective mechanisms for distributed group collaboration concerning the use and exploration of radar altimetry data for climate-related studies and detection of submarine earth resources; - TEN-34: Proposes the deployment of trans-European networking facilities which will provide complementary international capacity to allow the national research network investments to be exploited on a global basis. The technical implementation of a high-speed network for research needs to address both the requirements for greater capacity and for support of emerging multi-media applications. Implementations will be phased both in terms of geographical and functional roll-out; - COBROW: Aims to validate a service allowing for sharing multimedia information synchronously. The proposal is based on combining the advantages of the WWW with the real-time communication capabilities of JVTOS (Joint Viewing and Teleoperation Service), a group communication and collaboration service developed in the RACE proposal CIO; - ICE-TEL: Aims to develop, in line with general security concepts currently being developed on the Internet, a large-scale public key certification infrastructure. To develop and deploy security toolkits which allow for the integration of the service into the applications. The results of the VALUE II PASSWORD project are the basis for this proposal; - JAMES: Offers the usage of the trans-European ATM pilot managed by the telecom operators as a means for interconnection of national research networks at 34-155 Mbits/s at agreed service levels; - ADVISER: Will promote the development of networked relationships between universities, laboratories and science parks by developing a structured information model, which will be used to integrate telematics services such as directory and navigation systems with collaborative working environments; - ATRE: Addresses the implementation and testing of the new generation of Internet Protocol (IP), allowing for the usage of existing applications as well as new ones (e.g. multimedia conferencing) on the basis of ATM as means for improving the quality of applications for collaborative research; - WEB4GROUPS: The establishment of a service for multimedia asynchronous group communication, including multimedia e-mail. Advanced functionality will cover linking a discussion group to a Web page, support for multilingual discussions, inquiry tools, intelligent filters and security features; - REMOT: Will allow astronomic users to perform observations in a remote manner controlling and monitoring a telescope and associated instrumentation in real-time; SCIMITAR: Proposes to provide concertation between programme participants and relevant research network user organizations. The proposal furthermore addresses the provisioning of an information point for dissemination of all results arising from the individual proposals between users and providers of networking services and standards bodies.