ESTeam

Berlin, Töreboda, May 2012 – The European Commission, Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion DG, has signed a 2-year framework contract with ESTeam AB. In order to develop, manage and disseminate the ESCO classification (European skills/competences, qualifications, and occupations), the European Commission requires external expertise to support the development, enhancement, assessment and management of the ESCO taxonomy and other taxonomies.
ESCO’s objective is to develop a multilingual, structured, easy-to-use terminology to describe the most relevant skills, competences and qualifications needed for several thousand occupations. This brings benefits to both jobseekers and employers. For example, it could be used to help jobseekers better describe their skill sets, or to develop new training initiatives adapted to the needs of the labour market and improved career guidance services.

ESTeam is providing expertise on taxonomies, semantic technologies as well as controlled vocabularies and terminological resources.

EURES Portal (basis of the ESCO classification)

Berlin, Töreboda May 2012 – OHIM, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs), based in Alicante, Spain, has signed a 4-Year framework contract with ESTeam AB. In a continuous effort to improve business processes, OHIM requires and implements high-quality and value-adding services with regard to the usage of domain language in legal decision support scenarios.

With many years of experience in intellectual property matters, ESTeam is delivering linguistic consultancy and development services, such as linguistic text mining and database cleaning, textual information retrieval, multilingual terminology management, resource providing and decision support analysis, tools and systems to OHIM.

OHIM homepage

In a support action the EU is funding the creation of a forum for language technologies (LT) companies. The Language Technology Innovation Forum had its constituting meeting on Jan 27 in Brussels. The forum aims to have hundred members by June this year. On June 20 it will have, adjacent to the META meeting in Brussels, its first General Assembly featuring the award session for the LT biz contest.

The forum is supposed to be driven by industry focusing on SMEs and their needs. Therefore the forum has created an Industrial Advisory Board and a Steering Committee. Initiatives shall be driven through Special Interest Groups. Jochen Hummel, CEO of ESTeam, has been elected chairman of the Steering Committee. He is heading the SIG for eGovernment aiming to position LT in the Semantic Layer of the EU’s Interoperability Model. He will also work closely with the forum on developing an Innovation Agenda for the LT industry.

Read more on lt-innovate.eu and follow @LTinnovate, @LangTechNews, and @JochenHummel on Twitter

LT-Innovate homepage

ESTeam was pleased to host the LISE EMB/TMB meetings in its offices in Berlin. On 2nd and 3rd February LISE consortium members from University Vienna, EURAC, the European Union, crosslang, and ESTeam met to review the first 12 months of the project and to plan the next steps and deliverables.

Project coordinator Tanja Wissik started with a status assessment. We particularly tried to identify items that require clarification before the first official project review meeting end of March with the EU project officer. We then listed and discussed upcoming marketing and dissemination activities, concretely the attendance of LISE partners at the IRIS 2012 conference end of February in Salzburg, the LREC in Istanbul and the TKE in Madrid. The last session of the first day was dedicated to the LISE business plan, where I’ve reported on ESTeam’s in-depth research on the terminology market landscape and how LISE could see commercial success.
On the second day Elena Chiocchetti from EURAC reported on their user research progress and about the outcome of interviews with terminology managers in administrations – the survey is still running and also available online. Then we’ve dedicated a lot of time to demonstrate the already fully functional LISE collaboration portal, developed by ESTeam. It was very encouraging to see that the user needs as identified by EURAC matches very well with what has been implemented in the portal. A fascinating project!

LISE homepage

ESTeam attended the 6th European Ministerial eGovernment Conference, entitled "Borderless eGovernment Services for Europeans" on 17 – 18 November 2011 in the City of Poznań organized by the Polish Presidency of the European Union and the European Commission. The conference, a major event during the Polish Presidency, attracted approximately 900 stakeholders from around the world: ministers from EU member states, officials from national, regional and local administrations, industry representatives, civil society and experts.

The conference focused on three main aspects of eGovernance:

• Policy issues
• Interoperability strategies
• People’s concerns for issues like the impact of eGovernment services, inclusiveness, public value, user empowerment and quality assurance.

Large scale projects such as Peppol were presented and they are due to end in less than one year from now. Regrettably only very few governments are implementing these projects into their infrastructure. The European Commission needs to take a greater responsibility for eGovernment projects that they fund and be the first to put them to use. The needs of the Commission must be considered in these projects since this is the only way that cross border operability will be achieved. The need for cross border services should be implemented by the owner of the problem, namely the organization that crosses EU borders.

Not a lot has happened since the Malmö conference during the last two years. We believe this is due to governments being reluctant to change but rather keep their own operational structure and cost. Furthermore it is apparent that implemented local solutions remain a functional island, missing the potential to be exploited further in other regions – not to mention even other countries. Interoperability and cross border services are fashionable terms in eGovernment but without more actual substance than the plain understanding that the problem is actually there. We are still far away from what to do about the problem.

It is noteworthy that no presented project was close to the scale of Euroclass. Euroclass supports SMEs across Europe to register a trademark in one single step in all EU languages and in any country in a pan European collaborative effort. In such areas progress rather looks slow, while every single step forward is extremely important, since it facilitates the communication between citizens and government as well as having the task to effectively cut the cost and improve the structure of government operations.

Words such as standardization and interoperability are frequently used. Question is how do you standardize in a world with such varied legal and parliamentary systems? Here you must decide to disagree and remember that the insight and knowledge about of where you disagree is also a result of harmonization and interoperability.

ESTeam met many fantastic people from all over Europe with great ideas. The human potential is clearly there for realizing solutions to change old fashioned management and communication methods in European governments.

Conference home page
Peppol home page
Euroclass

The Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) has had its 20th anniversary this year in Glasgow. Over the years, CIKM developed into a prime meeting venue for all scientists interested in information technologies, from both academia and industry. This year, the conference accepted 137 of the 917 paper submissions it received (a 15% acceptance rate), and established its position as one of the largest and most selective conferences in the field.

In addition to all the academic papers, the Thursday industry session was particularly interesting. Stephen Robertson, one of the key personalities of information retrieval, started the session with an acknowledgement of the needs of professional search, in contrast to the vast majority of research done on web search. He argued that instead of viewing professional search as a specific case, it is the web search that is in fact the exception to the rule. Only in web search do we have a practically unlimited data source, where recall is rendered useless and precision rules. He mentioned legal, prior-art and healthcare search as the prototypical professional search scenarios, which require further attention from the information retrieval community. There were also other interesting talks, in particular that of Khalid Al-Kofahi (Thomson Reuters) describing a new search system for legal search applied to civil law jurisdictions.

Together with the main conference, a total of 15 workshops were organized, to cater to all the different aspects of information sources and uses. Among them, the Patent Information Retrieval (PaIR) workshop (4th edition) was organized by Mihai Lupu, member of ESTeam. PaIR 2011 was equally attended by both industry and academic participants. Among them, we counted Google, Springer and CambridgeIP.

The conference was not all about work and also invited the attendees to a series of social events, starting the night before the conference, with a whiskey distillery tour. It continued on Monday with a welcome reception, on Tuesday with a Civic Reception hosted by the Mayor of the city, and finally a conference banquet on Wednesday, in the stunningly-restored Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

CIKM home page
Patent Information Retrieval Workshop

ESTeam was pleased to host the EU PLuTO meeting in the very picturesque town of Chania in Crete. On 29^th and 30^th September PLuTO consortium members from Dublin City University, CrossLang, and ESTeam met to review the first 18 months of the project and to plan the next steps and deliverables.

We kicked off with a review from the PLuTO project coordinator John Tinsley. He particularly demoed a plug-in that makes patent translations available in web browsers upon a simple mouse-click. Joeri van de Walle from CrossLang then illustrated interesting facts about the quality of the machine translation results: the focus on the patent domain guarantees that PLuTO creates better results than other translation systems. Lambros Kranias from ESTeam proudly presented his research on the encouragingly high number of TM subsegment recycling rate. My presentation on potential strategies on commercialization and productization concluded the first day.

On the second day we’ve split into smaller groups and had several productive workshops spread all across the sunny conference site.

PLuTO homepage