European Projects

National Projects

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ALIS
Title: Automated Legal Intelligent System (ALIS)
Official Website: http://www.alisproject.eu/
Type of Project: STREP
Contract Number: 027968
Coordinator: Prof. Michel Rudianski
Duration: 1/1/2006 - 31/12/2008
Objectives: ALIS will develop an innovative system in order to provide European citizens and private companies with a transparent, fast, secure and reliable access to the European Legal Knowledge. Attention will be paid to develop a system that will be: inclusive: open to citizens as well as to SMEs and industries; Pan-European: open and useable in the whole European Union; Productive: time- and cost-effective; Ergonomic: user-friendly to provide easy access to relevant information; Intelligent: capable of developing reasoning adapted both to the user and to the case under consideration.
Expected Results: ALIS will make the management of legal knowledge easier, in order to: Avoid conflicts through prevention; Quicken judiciary decisions; Facilitate compliance with laws and regulations; Facilitate the evolution of legal systems.
Other Partners:

  • ORT FRANCE
  • Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
  • Sineura
  • Atos Origin Sociedad Anonima Espanola
  • Research Centre for Legal and Economical Aspects of Electronic Communication
  • SIVECO ROMANIA SA
  • EXALEAD SA
  • Technical University Darmstadt
  • Alma Consulting

ESTRELLA
Title: European project for Standardized Trasparent Representations in order to Extend LegaL Accessibility (ESTRELLA)
Official Website: http://www.estrellaproject.org/
Type of Project: STREP
Contract Number: 027655
Coordinator: Prof. Tom van Engers
Duration: 1/1/2006 - 30/6/2008
Objectives: The main technical objectives of the Estrella project are to develop a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), building upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web, including RDF and OWL, and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) for interacting with legal knowledge-based systems. To achieve and demonstrate vendor neutrality and independence, translators between the LKIF format and the existing proprietary formats of LKBS vendors participating in the project will be developed. To demonstrate and validate the Estrella platform, European tax related legislation and national tax legislation of two European countries will be modelled and used in the pilot applications. The finance ministries or tax administrations of several other European countries will take part in an Observatory Board to ensure generality of the approach.
Expected Results: Estrella will support, in an integrated way, both legal document management and legal knowledge-based systems, to provide a complete solution for improving the quality and efficiency of the determinative processes of public administration requiring the application of complex legislation and other legal sources. Estrella will facilitate a market of interoperable components for legal knowledge-based systems, allowing public administrations and other users to freely choose among competing development environments, inference engines, and other tools.
Other Partners:

  • Universiteit van Amsterdam
  • The University of Liverpool
  • Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur foerderung der angewandten forschung
  • RuleWise b.v.
  • RuleBurst (EUROPE) Limited
  • knowledgeTools International Gmbh
  • Interaction Design Ltd
  • SOGEI - Società Generale d'Informatica S.P.A.
  • CNIPA - Centro Nazionale per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione
  • Hungarian Tax and Financial Control Administration
  • Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem - Budapest
  • Bundesministerium der Finanzen
  • Ministero dell'Economia e delle Finanze
  • Consorzio Pisa Ricerche

ALMA TWO
Title: Adaptive Learning Management Asses for Advanced Learning Methodology-driven Architecture
Official Website: http://www.almatwo.it/
Type of Project: Progetto finanziato nell'ambito del Piano telematico Regionale 2002
Coordinator: Prof. Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna
Duration: 2005-2007
Objectives: The Alma Two project is an industrial research project conceived to realize and improve new products and services for e-learning. Alma Two focuses its research actions on e-learning, adopting intervention strategies that will allow to: i) take advantage of the contributions promoted by the adoption of social-constructive didactical models and by net-collaborative technologies, optimizing the scientific contributions and the current research lines coming from different Departments of the University of Bologna involved in the project; ii) concur to the creation of "knowledge infrastructures" as central matter of the debate on the support to the occupation promoted by the European Council in Lisbon; iii) to manage a web of relationships between public and private subjects who, for their roles and functions in the project and on the territory, play the role of "knowledge spreaders". The project studies the digitisation standards of the didactical contents (learning objects) with the objective to make possible the "re-use" of the contents and their interchange among various contexts and frames. This means to think about e-learning as a new way for a diffused, usable and accessible learning, that can be integrated with competences and curricular data management systems of various customers, to make learning process more effective and to guarantee a real distributed intelligence in a real government optical of "long life learning".
Expected Results: The research project aims to investigate some specific aspects of e-learning, considering in first instance the contributions of various academic disciplines and, at the same time, to strengthen the collaborations with industrial enterprises. A particular attention will be paid to the individualization and personalization of the learning process. Furthermore the project aims to create an integrated e-learning system able to realize a "distributed intelligence" and to support the formative life of an individual in different organizational contexts, both public and private. The e-learning system must therefore: permit to re-use knowledge, contents and learning environments among University, Public Administration and employment market; grant online environments for contents creation, composition and update in order to reduce times and costs of production of such contents and to facilitate the creation/remodulation of new contents; consider the "accessibility standards" to permit use of the learning systems by disabled customers, through assistance technologies; improve the learning process supplying multichannel interactive contents and simulations, with automatic contents management based on the hardware and software capabilities of the user's machine. CIRSFID's researchers, consistently with this framework, will define how to regulate authors' right management of the software "prototypes" and "products" developed within the project thanks to private and public funding, with the purpose of delineate the modalities that project partners might have to adopt to better spread and commercialize their products.
Advising and assistance on procedures and operational modalities to be applied in solving possible copyright issues will be supplied to all the partners, indicating guidelines and best practices to be followed on specific contractual issues and in negotiating between several interlocutors.
Other Partners:

  • University of Bologna: Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Educazione, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica (DEIS), Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, Polo Scientifico Didattico di Forlì, Centro Interfacoltà per le Tecnologie Avanzate e Multimediali (CITAM).
  • Industrial partners: Consorzio Almaweb, CSP Innovazione nelle ICT, Giunti interactive Labs, Microsoft, Sinform,Think3.

DiCSI
Title: The dynamics of knowledge in the information society
Official Website: http://linus.media.unisi.it/cirg/dicsi/
Type of Project: Progetto di ricerca di rilevante interesse nazionale (PRIN) del Ministero dell'Istruzione dell'Università e della Ricerca (MIUR)
Coordinator: Prof. Cristiano Castelfranchi, Università degli Studi di Siena
Duration: 1/1/2006 - 1/1/2008
Objectives: This research program investigates the dynamics of knowledge in the information society, both as a cognitive phenomenon (the way in which knowledge is acquired, consolidated, modified and lost in the mind on an individual faced by multiple information sources), as a social phenomenon (how knowledge emerges, circulates, spreads and differentiates in social groups, both spontaneous aggregations and stable organizations), and as the interaction of those two levels (the emergence of social knowledge from individual interaction, and the effects of society on individual knowledge dynamics). In order to tackle effectively such ambitious themes, the research program will exploit the multidisciplinary expertise of the Units involved, will take care of preliminarily defining few areas of priority interest, and will be articulated in stages, as to ensure the achievement of its scientific objectives.
Expected Results: This research programme will produce significant innovation about: a) socio-cognitive models and formal representations of epistemic dynamics; b) cognitive processes of belief revision; c) knowledge dynamics in juridical cognition; d) knowledge dynamics and digital information; e) the role of information in decision making.
Other Partners:

  • Università degli Studi di Siena - Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione
  • Università IUAV di Venezia - Dipartimento delle Arti e del Disegno Industriale
  • Università Politecnica delle Marche - Dipartimento di Elettronica, Intelligenza Artificiale e Telecomunicazioni
  • Università degli Studi di Siena - Dipartimento di Economia Politica

"Medical Genetics amid Technique, Bioethics, and Law""
Title: Medical Genetics amid Technique, Bioethics, and Law
Official Website:
Type of Project: Progetto Strategico dell'Università di Bologna
Coordinator: Prof. Carla Faralli, University of Bologna
Duration: 2005-2007
Objectives: The research project presented here addresses precisely the concerns underlying the new ground that genetics is breaking, looking at some of its technical facets and the related ethical and legal implications.
The project brings together three research areas designed to complement one another, entrusted to as many research groups based at CIRSFID and at the Medical Genetics Chair and Operating Unit of the University of Bologna. The three research areas are as follows: Genetics Area, Bioethics Area and Law Area. The possibility of studying the same question from different perspectives will enable each sub-group to advantage the work done by the others. Thus, the analysis and casuistry provided by the medical-genetics group will make it possible to identify the aspects to focus on - the ethical and legal questions needing greatest attention - and from these studies we will be able to draw elements that will prove useful in the activity carried out by the medical-genetics unit: a virtuous circle that goes from practice to theory and vice versa, thereby yielding such useful interaction as will facilitate research and enhance its ability to produce concrete results.
Expected Results:
(A) Genetics Area
The Medical Genetics Chair and Operating Unit of the University of Bologna will produce a casuistry of issues in psychology and ethics as these emerge from the geneticist's day-to-day practice, and will draw up, working with researchers in bioethics, guidelines for a correct approach to different situations. This unit will also be responsible for working out models of informed consent that are specific to the different diagnostic methods used in medical genetics, and for identifying measures aimed at securing greater protection for the privacy of genetic data, this working in collaboration with the researchers in the law area. (B) Bioethics Area
The researchers in bioethics at CIRSFID will be responsible for looking at the casuistry - the data coming from clinical studies and from genetics-consultancy services - and analyzing this data with a view to the moral issues involved. The purpose is to trace out health-care and ethical guidelines that ethical committees and hospitals can use in making practical choices.
(C) Law Area
The jurists at CIRSFID will take the casuistry provided by the Medical Genetics Chair and Operating Unit of the University of Bologna and will study on this basis the issues relating to the protection of genetic data, identifying as well the measures to be taken in the effort to strengthen such protection. So, too, the jurists will consider genetic research in connection with intellectual property, with specific reference to the patentability of biotechnological inventions.
Other Partners:

  • Medical Genetics Chair and Operating Unit of the University of Bologna (Cattedra e U.O. di Genetica Medica del Dipartimento di medicina interna, cardioangiologia, epatologia dell'Università di Bologna)

Open source and Intellectual Property
Title: Open source and Intellectual Property
Official Website: http://www.ricercaitaliana.it/prin/dettaglio_completo_prin_en-2005121515.htm
Type of Project: Progetto di ricerca di rilevante interesse nazionale (PRIN) del Ministero dell'Istruzione dell'Università e della Ricerca (MIUR)
Coordinator: Prof. Luigi Carlo UBERTAZZI, Università degli Studi di Pavia
Duration: 2005-2007
Objectives: The research program hereby proposed will study the phenomenon of the open source proceeding from some strong interwoven perspectives, advised from different elements of discontinuity that the growth of this kind of software introduced in the cultural panorama of our society.
From an epistemology point of view, the open source model provides the application to the entrepreneur producing of methods of the to know how sharing that up to now were only typical of the scientific community. From a computer science point of view, the open source model stimulates organizational manners of the production and styles of planning of the strong innovative software. From an economical point of view plan the open source model values systems of incentives and of to develop of business alternative to those traditionally used by the software houses. From the legal point of view the pursuit of these objectives asks development of licensing techniques that overturn the traditional role of the intellectual property.
This multidimensional nature of the open source phenomenon advises different lines of search between them complementary, that aim to investigate the nature of new source of intellectual property on the philosophical point of view, computer science, economical and technician-legal points of view.
Expected Results: On the philosophical point of view the research here proposed aim to investigates the epistemological aspects involved in the development and in the employment of the open source software. Particularly the research will study the cognitive process involved in software development, the connection between cognitive possibilities and legal rights, the processes of collective knowledge-acquisition and their use in software development, the relationship between the economic benefits of research and the need to make research widely available, the possibilities that OSS opens up and how these relate to the rights and values protected and fostered by our legal system.
From the computer science point of view, the research hereby proposed will be directed to investigate the organizational and technological aspects of the open source development and the role that these aspects play in the development of the software to an open standard.
From the economical point of view the research has the objective to investigate what kind of incentives might be for a software developer to participate to open source projects; what kind of political cultural should been undertaken to manage the production and the spread of a resource (that the free software) that seems to have all the features of the public assets; what kind of evaluations of cost/benefits should been developed before being able to choose between proprietor and free software.
On the technical-legal point of view, the research project will try to a) verify the impact of the intellectual property discipline in the freedom of circulation of information relevant to the software, as well as the reconstruction of the regime of rights belonging on open source software, of the statute of the rights used for its circulation, and of the regime of the automatic systems of management of the right on this software; b) accordingly to the discipline of the competition the project will also study the compatibility of the technologies of open source licensing with the position of abuse of dominant position and of economical dependence; c) accordingly to the international law the research will study the rules of conflict and of distribution of the international jurisdiction applicable to the relations bred from the use and from the circulation of the software.
Other Partners:

  • Università degli Studi di Foggia - Scienze Giuridiche Privatistiche
  • Università "Cà Foscari" di Venezia - Scienze Giuridiche
  • Università degli Studi di Bologna;
  • Libera Università di lingue e comunicazione IULM-MI - Economia e marketing