Research Activities

The EU has identified ICT (IT and communication technology) as one of the important areas for Europe's successful participation in the future information society. Therefore it invests heavily in ICT research projects in order to increase the competitiveness of the European IT industry. Correspondingly, the German government also supports these goals with complementary research programs. Software AG as the leading European system software vendor is thus one of the main invited contributors. Therefore Software AG is engaged in several EU and national projects in order to evaluate and research new areas for its products and customers. The focus of Software AG's current research projects lies in the area of SOA.

Currently, Software AG participate in the following research projects:

ADiWa (Allianz Digitaler Warenfluss / Digital Flow of Goods)

NeOn (Networked Ontologies)

BRITE (Business Register Interoperability Throughout Europe)

ADiWa

The goal of the ADiWa project (Allianz Digitaler Warenfluss, http://www.adiwa.net) is to research, implement and study mechanisms that promote the selection, composition, control or even complete new development of complex, dynamic business processes, using information gathered from the real world. On the one hand, Digital Flow of Goods means support for the flow of physical goods, and equally on the other hand the flow of purely digital goods, digital information or digitally traded goods, such as services.

ADiWa is a consortium of the three big German software companies - SAP, IDS Scheer and Software AG - together with the leading research institutions, Fraunhofer, DFKI and the Technical Universities of Darmstadt and Dresden. As user partners, companies like Globus, DB Schenker and ABB are members of the consortium. It is supported by the German ministry for research and education (BMBF),

Software AG's main contribution to ADiWa will be in the area of Complex Event Processing (CEP). CEP provides a suitable mechanism for combining business processes with the unpredictability of the real world via Internet-of-Things technologies (like RFID applications).

NeOn

NeOn is a large European R&D project involving 14 European partners and co-funded by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme. NeOn started in March 2006 and has a duration of 4 years. Our aim is to advance the state of the art in using ontologies for large-scale semantic applications in distributed organizations. An important goal of NeOn is to create the NeOn toolkit (www.neon-toolkit.org) as a leading ontology engineering platform, which supports the complete development life-cycle of such a new generation of semantic applications together with an accompanying methodology.

Software AG participates in the development of registry-based infrastructures for the NeOn toolkit and is developing plug-ins for the NeOn toolkit to support the integration of ontologies into SOA components. For more information on the project please refer to http://www.neon-project.org. 

BRITE

EU Directives are shaping the company landscape in the EU. The emerging "EU Company Law" provides added flexibility and new options to the entrepreneur whilst guaranteeing the protection of the economic actors that deal with companies.

In domains other than Company Law, but connected to it, EU legislation is being set up to facilitate business and reduce business risks. Priorities for the EU are: to prevent financial crime, to combat money laundering, to ensure transparency of the financial market, whilst facilitating the free movement of companies and services.
The Business Registers (BRs) are the first, necessary points of contact that companies have with the public administrations. As such, the BRs are obviously instrumental in implementing EU Company Law. The BRs, in an enlarged EU where companies will move freely, need to interact across borders, to exchange company registration information and to do so despite possible administrative, technical, cultural and language barriers. To be effective, each BR needs to be able to interact with all other European BRs, and to interpret company registration information coming from all the other countries. Eventually, all BRs need to integrate their operational processes and systems so as to perform efficiently.

BRITE addresses cross-border BR interoperability at all levels: organisational, technical, and semantic. It also addresses interoperability across "domains", i.e. interoperability between the BRs and the public agencies that operate in the selected sub-domains of e-Government.

At the trans-national level, the European BRs have been collaborating since the early nineties, having established the European Business Register, a network that allows the public to securely access through the Internet the company data stored in the participating BRs, using a multi-language user interface. There is as yet, however, no ICT instrument capable of effectively managing the duality of trans-national laws and national laws that interplay in the implementation of European legislation and other cross-border initiatives. Nor is there an instrument capable of efficiently accommodating the broad spectrum of cross-border services, across a number of domains, in which the Business Registers of Europe could make a critical contribution that is highly customizable yet flexible and extensible; an instrument that includes mechanisms for creating, designing, and implementing high-value e-Government scenarios enabled by the Business Registers of Europe.
BRITE has set out to create that instrument.

For more details on the BRITE project please refer to the BRITE web site at http://www.briteproject.eu/.