News from the projects before 2008

06/12/2007: RoboBraille wins the Social Contribution Award 2007

The Synscenter Refsnæs and the RoboBraille Consortium has won the “Social Contribution Award 2007” from the British Computer Society. The award was presented on 6 December 2007 in London.

RoboBraille is an email-based service capable of translating documents into either synthetic speech or contracted Braille. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users and no registration is required. Originally a Danish service, a pan-European consortium is currently validating RoboBraille in Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom with financial support from the European Commission.

05/12/2007: EUROWEX Conference on  Digital Signature Solutions for Higher Education

The EUROWEX project is organizing its public workshop on 5 December 2007, in Bucharest, Romania, on Digital Signature Solutions for Higher Education. The conference will discuss the legal and security framework related to digital signatures and will present experience gained through the EUROWEX trials in Romania. The programme is now available.

Eurowex provides a tool to manage paperless processes for exams and the administrative aspects of university lectures, with the use of a digital signature. Further information about the project can be found at www.eurowex.org.

28/09/2007: The eTEN Tenuta support action project helped to improve the accessibility and usability of eTEN e-service projects by providing guidance on how to design solutions that are not only accessible to the widest possible user base including people with disabilities and older people, but also easy to use for everyone. The Tenuta web site will remain an active repository of tips on how to improve usability and accessibility, many useful links, relevant FAQs and a number of interesting case studies from the Tenuta project.

Europrise

Breaking Barriers to eGovernment workshop, 31 October 2007, Florence, Italy

The project, "Breaking Barriers to eGovernment: overcoming obstacles to improving European public services", held its sixth workshop on 31 October 2007 at the Law Faculty at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence Italy. The workshop was held in collaboration with the EUI and co-branded with ePractice.eu.

The eTEN project EuroPriSe was presented during a session on Privacy Seals. EuroPriSe aims to establish a scheme of privacy seals around Europe as a way to establish greater trust amongst users. The European Privacy Seal certifies that an IT product or IT based service facilitates the use of that product or service in a way compliant with European regulations on privacy and data protection, taking into account the legislation in the specific country. Further information about the workshop can be found at here.

RoboBraille International Conference

Synscenter Refsnæs and the RoboBraille Consortium are hosting an international conference on 30 November 2007 in order to introduce the RoboBraille Service and how information technology can be used to support a more inclusive information society. The preliminary programme as well as information on how to sign up is now available. Updated version of the programme will be available at the RoboBraille website (www.robobraille.org). Participation at the conference is free, excluding travel and accommodation.

RoboBraille is an email-based service capable of translating documents into either synthetic speech or contracted Braille. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users and no registration is required. Originally a Danish service, a pan-European consortium is currently validating RoboBraille in Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom with financial support from the European Commission. The Danish part of RoboBraille has been available since 2004. In January 2007, support for British English, Italian, Portuguese and Greek was added to the service. In June 2007, support for French and Lithuanian added. The RoboBraille service has been shortlisted as a finalist for the 2007 Social Contribution Project Award awarded by the British Computer Society as part of its Project Excellence Awards. The winners will be announced on December 6, 2007.

NETC@RDS: new service points

The initial deployment phase of NETC@RDS project is aimed at achieving the widest implementation of an online service for the announced electronic European Health Insurance Card (eEHIC). The existing service, already successfully tested in 85 pilots across 10 EU Member States, will be progressively extended to enable “non-planned” health care access for European mobile citizens who provide evidence of their enrolment in the national insurance schema. This is presently deployed over 305 sites across 15 Member States as part of the deployment phase of Netc@rds. Among these, new service points at Hôpital Saint-Roch in Nice (France) and in the Lörrach area (Germany, French/Swiss border), involving 5 ambulatories care and 2 hospitals, have been recently inaugurated. The pan-European and interoperable NETC@RDS solution for the EHIC electronification was presented during a parallel session and demonstrated at the exhibition at the eChallenges e-2007 in The Hague, on 24-26 October 2007.  

HANDS successfully completed

The Helping Answers Decision Service (HANDS) project from Call 2004, successfully completed its final review in July. HANDS is an online communication service offered by Public Bodies to citizens. Thanks to the use of advanced NLP-based technology, citizens can pose questions in their own language on Public Bodies’ websites, and they will obtain relevant answers in the same language – thus reducing the barriers of online communication between citizens and Public Bodies. The project fully reached its goal to market-validate the service, investigating its administrative and economic viability and identifying the conditions for its future deployment on a European scale.

OPTIPARK faces market

After a successful final review, consortium has learnt from the market validation process and paves the way for the commercial exploitation of the smart e-parking platform. After having validated the service in six different cities in Europe, it is now time for the OPTIPARK consortium to face the real world and exploit the platform commercially from the experience gained.

OPTIPARK’s main goal is to enhance urban mobility and to optimise parking space by launching an innovative implementation of electronic parking services, trying to increase effective available capability and upgrading quality services to other business activities (i.e. hotels, theatres or cinemas) by offering and managing a whole parking service network. In other words, OPTIPARK works as a Parking Brokerage Service or as an intermediary; an interactive electronic market place matching parking space demand with existing parking space resources, thereby improving and controlling public and private parking space.

RISER gains private investor for European market rollout

The European market rollout of the Registry Information Service on European Residents (RISER Service) will be strengthened by the engagement of the corporate financing specialist FCF Fox Corporate Finance GmbH. RISER is facilitating the retrieval of information from official population registers for the purpose of cross-border address verification via the Internet. With the backing of FCF, this eGovernment service will be extended to 19 European Member States by 2009.

06-07/09/2007: 3rd Conference on eServices in European Civil Registration, Budapest, Hungary

The 3rd Conference on E-Services in European Civil Registration aims to highlight the latest development and upcoming challenges for national civil registration in Europe. The conference will cover political, economic, organisational and legal aspects of E-Services in European Civil Registration and related issues. Key topics of the 2007 conference are: requirements of business and administration in cross-border address verification; modern civil registration in South-East Europe; cross-border enforcement of national privacy protection regulations and trans-European eIdentities and the role of unique identifiers.

The conference provides a platform for stakeholders in European Civil Registration, representatives of local, national and EU administrations and cooperating economies to discuss the future of European civil registration. The conference is organised by the RISER Consortium that implemented one of the first Trans-European E-Service in European Civil Registration. The RISER Service is the leading source for address verification from European public registers. More: http://www.riser.eu.com; Contact: htamm@psi.de

VIDAVO starts the deployment of an eHealth solution based on the e-Vital concept in Greece
e-Vital, an eTEN project from Call 2001, validated the European market for the provision of a remote monitoring telemedicine service employing vital signs monitoring devices on the move. The device transfers critical vital parameters on-line to doctors and medical consultants, regardless of their location, while getting feedback back to the patients.

After the eTEN phase was completed in 2004 their final Business Plan attracted the interest of a business angel in Greece. Following two years of hard negotiations and three versions of a more focused Business Plan, the business was finally supported by a venture capital, creating a new company, called VIDAVO. The focus of the new entity is on the development of novel integrated telematics solutions in the healthcare sector. VIDAVO provides technical support for health telematics applications and consulting support for the effective integration of these solutions and for the optimization of the quality of healthcare services.

The primary group targeted for this service is the visually impaired and other print-impaired readers. Commercial users from pharmaceutical, financial and public sectors constitute the second target group for RoboBraille. With the financial support of the European Commission within the framework of eTEN programme, the Danish RoboBraille service is currently being tested in Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and the United Kingdom.

During the German Presidency, an international conference on "Knowledge by Networking: Digitising Culture in Germany and Europe" will be organised on 21-22 June 2007 in Berlin. An overview of the different initiatives taken so far within several European countries will help situate the level of digitalisation in the cultural framework. This event will encourage cooperation among the different cultural organisations for the creation of a wider European digital network. A special attention will be given to the Michael project, which is extending its service beyond France, Italy and UK to eleven additional Member States.

SELIS provides a service for the secure exchange of e-invoicing that complies with the security standards imposed by the European Commission policies. SELIS is validating the service in the European market. SELIS has extended trials and evaluations among three involved Chambers of Commerce and thirteen SMEs from Romania, Greece and France. It encouraged as well other users to participate in the pilot phase. SELIS has been presented in the CEN/ISSS (European Committee for Standardisation/Information Society Standardisation System) eInvoicing Focus Group Report as a Member State example (Greece) for an eInvoicing solution. SELIS also embraced the collaboration with the CEN. Within this context, a SELIS demonstration will be presented again during the upcoming CEN workshop on 7 May 2007 in Brussels at the CENELEC Meeting Centre.

MobilAlarm, a project co-funded under the eTEN programme, tested an innovative alarm service for older, chronically ill and disabled people and for all those concerned about their safety while outside. The service enables them to initiate an alarm call whenever and wherever they need to do so.

After its successful completion in August 2005, activities carried on to launch the service in the market. This innovative, location-independent alarm service will soon be available on the market. Though elderly people and those suffering from chronic disease are the core market for the system, the MobilAlarm partners also see potential for it to be used by disabled but otherwise healthy people and possibly by victims of domestic violence or people carrying out hazardous jobs in remote locations. The commercial roll out of the system will probably target several user groups and involve both the public and private sector.

The final TENUTA course focuses on improved user acceptance and introduces the concepts and practice of usability and accessibility that can be applied within your eTEN project, and includes demonstrations by disabled people of how they use assistive technologies to access e-services.

No previous experience of usability or accessibility is assumed. There is no charge for the course for participants from current eTEN projects. The cost of travel and accommodation can be charged to your eTEN project under the usual conditions.

The EuroWorksafe portal aims at the reduction of occupational cancer incidence by providing information and consultancy on occupational cancer to citizens, workers, companies, SMEs and organisations in Europe. Semantic web approach is exploited to support all kind of users to find quickly and reliably the relevant information they are interested in among the huge amount of available data.

The ParkService project will be demonstrating the use of Internet-connected television and the INDIGO walking aid at a free public event on 27 March in London. The event will be aimed at clinicians, people with Parkinson’s and their carers. ParkService is validating the European market for a new service supporting people with Parkinson’s disease in their own homes. ParkService combines the secure exchange of video and messages through a simple television interface with “INDIGO” a unique mobility aid for people with Parkinson’s disease.

Over the past months Europe Unlimited & VIP Park implemented, under the eTEN Invest Promo Support Action, a programme to increase awareness of and create interest in eTEN projects by venture capitalists, intermediaries and advisors.

The initiative offered the eTEN projects the opportunity to participate in seven Venture Academies and seven additional investment events. The Venture Academies® offered participants vital tools to present their businesses effectively to potential venture capital investors and corporate partners. During the investment events, selected eTEN Project companies had the opportunity to present themselves to an international panel of venture capital and corporate investors followed by one2one meetings with investors of their choice. During the last such event, held on 8 March 2007 in Brussels, Europe Unlimited raised awareness within the European investor community of the following eTEN Projects: eParticipate, ePrescript, HelloDoc, Press4All, MEMO, ParkService and TOF-E.

The eTEN project CARMEN - in conjunction with W-SPES - hosted an eGovernance workshop in Prato, Italy on 5 March 2007. The workshop was opened in front of a broad European audience by the Mayor of Prato, followed by an overview of the CARMEN White Paper on the private sector concept of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) demonstrating how it has undergone transformation to become relevant in a public administration setting. Once introduced to the CARMEN project, delegates were given a project overview including achievements gained from implementing the CARMEN CRM modules within Administrations in the UK, Italy and Germany. Additional presentations during the Workshop were made by W-SPES and other European projects, and ample networking opportunities for presenters and delegates were available during the course of the day.

OpenIreland, a partner in the The OpenForum Europe (TOF-E) pan-European project is organising a briefing on 2 March 2007 at the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, on the trends of open source software in Ireland and in Europe. The goal of TOF-E is to offer a framework for the industry that will allow more confidence and commercial clarity of the whole Open Source process, thereby providing open, competitive choice for the end user.

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ENN-ICS helps people and medical professionals treat and better manage sleep disorders. The project's website offers direct access to medical information to health professionals and patients. On 2 March a workshop will be held at the University of Lisbon. At this closing session of ENN-ICC the achievements and the future potential of the project will be presented. Another aim of the event is to raise awareness towards the problems of sleep and sleep disorders.

The OPTESS service, connecting the offshore platforms with a network of medical centres of excellence providing telemedicine services, represents a concrete improvement of the overall efficiency of the healthcare system in the oil and gas sector. The dissemination activities of the OPTESS project – which finished in August 2006 - created great interest; contacts with potential customers are advanced and will be further exploited in the future. The OPTESS project on board Total Alwyn North has been awarded as the best project in the "Safety" category, at the Energy Institute 2006 Awards.

The second Eurocet dissemination workshop took place on 7 February 2007 at the European Parliament premises in Brussels. The workshop aimed at disseminating the project results, including the completion of the database of 15 Member States' national data represented in the project.

Representatives of the European Commission, national competent authorities for tissues and cells, policy makers of the national health divisions, transplant organisations, scientific societies and professionals of the field attended this event with high interest in project results and its future deployment. Some project partner organisations illustrated specific aspects connected with the project and with the social and political background.

Moreover, the Italian Citizen Association, the Italian Organ Donor Association and European Registry for Bone Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) presented the utility of a transplant portal for both citizens and professionals of the field.

The course provides an introduction to the concepts and practice of usability and accessibility, with demonstrations by disabled people of how they use assistive technologies to access e-services, and discussions about relevant techniques that can be applied within projects. The course targets project managers and members of the development team, particularly those responsible for the user interfaces. No previous experience of usability or accessibility is assumed. There is no charge for the course for participants from current eTEN projects. The cost of travel and accommodation can be charged to your eTEN project under the usual conditions.

Europe contains a vast amount of cultural and educational content. While the last decades have witnessed huge efforts to digitalise this content, much of this digital content unfortunately remains severely segmented. In this era of information and highly competitive economies, the European cultural and educational content needs to become easily usable in order to reach the final audience in an attractive and productive way. It also needs to become interoperable so as to allow for cooperation between similar entities, irrespective of their geographical location, native language or even segment.

This is the main challenge the eExhibitions workshop "Breaking the isolation: European Cultural & Educational Content and the Interoperability Challenge" is planning address on 30th of January in Lisbon, Portugal. The project is expecting participants from the academic environment, governmental bodies, European projects and also private companies. The objectives of this workshop are to address the emerging need in Europe for interoperable cultural and educational digital content, explore paths which enable the forming of cross-border alliances and collaborations, present solutions which permit cataloguing and use of cultural and educational content, show some of the steps that the European research and innovation has taken in this and other relevant fields and potentially provide the possibility to the visitors to have a hands-on experience to some of the solutions presented.

All persons, companies and institutions interested in the workshop are kindly invited to present their work and participate in the debate. Attendance is free but registration is necessary. You can register by sending an e-mail to info@eExhibitions.net. More information is available under http://www.eExhibitions.net.

EURIDICE is aimed at delivering access to the European cultural heritage contents for distance education in humanities - wide source of unique, premium and mostly unpublished contents from different providers, i.e.: archives, libraries and photographic repositories. The service offers an open environment to the educational institutions across Europe.

Recognition by the EU eTEN programme through the ‘project of the month’ award has added value and worth to the project outcome. It has demonstrated that a controlled approach with clear defined objectives can deliver outcomes that benefit the diverse range of healthcare delivery needs in European member states. As a direct result of the Health-eLife project, Docobo is now following up a number of enquiries from potential users for delivery of the doc@HOME service and requests to provide their experience and expertise in new research projects. Docobo has presented the outcome and service opportunities arising out of Health-eLife at ‘Medica’ in Dusseldorf, Germany from 15th – 18th of November.

The Netc@rds for eEHIC project aims at validating e-health services to be deployed via the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) through a wide trans-European network simplifying health care access procedures. The project partners are now ready to extend the Netc@rds service in 15 countries, i.e. 13 EU Member States as well as Norway and Romania. This expansion of the existing technological base will aim to increase the number of service points and to prepare for full deployment of the pan-European interoperable service.

Tenuta is running a second course to help eTEN projects learn how they can most effectively address the usability and accessibility of their e-solutions on 3-5 July 2006 at the University of York, UK. The course provides an introduction to the concepts and practice of usability and accessibility, with demonstrations by disabled people of how they use assistive technologies to access e-services, and discussions about relevant techniques that can be applied within projects. Each project will leave with a road map on how to enhance the usability and accessibility of the e-solution. The course targets project managers and members of the development team, particularly those responsible for the user interfaces. No previous experience of usability or accessibility is assumed. There is no charge for the course for participants from current eTEN projects. The cost of travel and accommodation can be charged to your eTEN project under the usual conditions.

The workshop in Bari (Italy), held on 18 May, was successful, with about 60 attendants from environmental agencies and environmental industries. More information: http://www.comune.bari.it/comune/opencms/sito/Bari/index.jsp