EASTWEB > General Information

Information Technology (IT) continues to evolve at an impressive rate. This happening in, and it is closely coupled to, a strongly interrelated and globalized network of institutions (nations, enterprises, markets, people etc..). These two simple observations have important implications:

1. Human Resources Development: new paradigms need to be explored. These models should assist societies and people in using IT and allow them to improve the quality of services (societies) and the quality of life (people). Furthermore, a particular attention should be put in supporting the need of the emerging societies, as well as in capturing all possible cross-fertilization aspects derived from diverse cultures and approaches.

2. Educational platforms: there is a need of new channels and supporting tools which allow the promotion of knowledge and understanding of recent developments in IT within and outside the computer science community.

3. Networking: new models need to be identified in order to assist efficiently the creation, evolution and sustainability of global networks of academic institutions and enterprises. These networks must be capable to transfer the most recent and promising developments in IT to markets, society and people in the large.

Deriving from these considerations, the overall objective of this project is to foster and promote the cooperation between European and Asian Institutions involved in IT education and research. The specific objective is to build an integrated leading Euro-Asian high education and research community in the field of the Semantic Web . The choice of Semantic Web as the core topic is motivated by the fact that it is currently one of the most promising research fields in Computer Science worldwide and European researchers are in this area the leading experts worldwide. The core idea of the Semantic Web is to make the meaning of the vast amount of data on the World Wide Web available to machine processing and thus intelligent queries and really helpful Internet agents. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web has the potential to be the next generation of the Web and to significantly change our daily life by lowering the barriers for accessing services and large volumes of information.