FZI - Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe
Germany
Role in the project: Principal Contractor
FZI is a non-profit contract research center, which belongs to the
federal state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. FZI is unique in its
structure since FZI has 12 departments which are headed by
professors from the University of Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Tübingen
and Munich. These professors act as directors of the departments,
but they are employed by the university. FZI has outstanding
experience in participating in international projects, e.g. EU-IST
projects. FZI is an organisation that concentrates its efforts on
novel information technologies for providers of investment and
consumer products, of production processes and of information
services.
Currently, professors from all four faculties co-operate closely
under the roof of FZI. FZI is judged a unique model of
interdisciplinary technology transfer that has now been operating
successfully for 15 years. Today, FZI is close to 100 employees,
among them more than 90 young scientists within currently 12
research groups. FZI is Authorized Java Centre (Sun), member of the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and member of the Object Management Group (OMG),
the standardization body for the Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA).
Vicodi is the joint project of two FZI groups: the DBS (Database Systems)
department and the WIM (Knowledge Management) department.
The WIM
(Knowledge Management) department within FZI was founded in December 2000 as partner institute of
Institute AIFB
(Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods) at the
University of Karlsruhe. The research department WIM has grounded
experience in the fields of managing and applying of ontologies
based on state-of-the-art Semantic Web methods, tools and standards.
Semantic web technologies are applied within different application
fields such as natural language processing and information
extraction, information integration, knowledge discovery, knowledge
portals for intranet-based knowledge management or distributed
virtual organizations. WIM is main developer of KAON,
an open source infrastructure for building semantics-driven
enterprise applications.
The Database Systems (DBS) Department as one of the oldest research groups within FZI has a long-term experience with respect to research work in the area of database systems in general and in the areas of information integration, e-commerce, content management and workflows systems in particular. DBS has also gained national and international reputation in Environmental Information Systems, especially in catalogue systems and metadata. The department has been and still is involved in various European projects like Coastbase
(www.coastbase.org) and LIP - Learning in Process.
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