Federation for Enterprise Knowledge Development

The ultimate goal of the project is to improve the quality of the end user services provided by Information System Departments, and the way of managing them. To reach this goal a strong basis for the management of platforms, networks and software is needed. The project aims at developing a service management system, based on truly integrated tools for the management of heterogeneous distributed networks and systems.

By the end of the project, the consortium will have the following tangible results in place: - Service management application enabling to manage both CORBA and non-CORBA objects. - Integration of CORBA within standard management environments. - Client/server intelligent help desk (trouble management, problem solving, knowledge authoring, problem knowledge base, etc.). - A system to monitor and manage a set of critical service level parameter, and service status. - Process, physical and logical, IT services management information and data model. - A set of WWW/Java-based user management tools and a demonstration of the tools in use. - A pilot site for demonstrating the project result, during and after the project duration. Although objectives and strategy for IT management must be established following a top-down approach, the implementation must follow a bottom-up approach. First we must be able to manage individual elements such as hubs, routers, servers, etc. and as we move up the pyramid, we should be able to manage response times for applications back-ups, capacity planning, problem tracking and resolution, service level accomplishment, etc. Being able to manage at different levels, means allowing different management functions to have different views on management information and using protocols that support communication and object sharing between functions and levels. Service Management requires a series of applications which are more sophisticated than those used today for individual element management, or for the integration of the networked information systems. Service management demands interoperability between network management systems and system management systems provided by multiple vendors. Efficient service management in this context can be defined as making IT services, for example access and use of corporate-critical non stop applications, available to the end user in a consistent manner, with a good cost-quality relation and fulfilling the requirements stated in a Service Level Agreement between the final users and the provider. INSERT will allow: - The networked information system to be perceived as a single one by its user. - Service availability to satisfy negotiated standards. - User problems and inquiries to be tracked and solved. - Customer needs to be collected and used for further evolution of the IS. All partners in this consortium are committed to marketing and using project results.

The project aims at offering a solution to the problem of " information overflow", i.e. the difficulty experienced both by large companies and SME's in extracting useful information from large amounts of data coming from the numerous electronic textual information services available at local or global level (Internet, proprietary networks, subscription services, World Wide Web, and more).

The key result of TREVI will be a set of software tools (the TREVI Toolkit) representing a substantial improvement in the management of distributed textual information sources. The TREVI Toolkit will not rely on simple text-based search tools; it will rather combine concept-based search and active data mining techniques to enrich online input test streams by providing indexing, abstraction, smart correlation with data and knowledge sources, compilation into electronic publication formats and subscription capability on the results through communication services (for example, HTML documents servers on WWW). From the technical point of view, the success of TREVI will be measured by the consortium's ability to create a prototype system combining state-of-the-art linguistic tools with new advances in electronic publishing and information gathering and filtering, which will be easily turned into a set of marketable products featuring a substantial, world-wide customer base. The TREVI prototype will provide exploitation possibilities both as a full package (the TREVI Toolkit) industrialised and marketed by ITACA, and as individual software tools to be marketed by the developing partners. From the users' standpoint, success will be checked against actual improvements in the partners' business activities. These will be achieved by building TREVI-based demonstrator systems providing : - steady, effective access to all relevant business information related to actual news events, such as import/export, travel, telesales, finance, transportation and logistics; - more efficient management of substantial electronic document traffic and correlation of text items with each other (for example, memos with company procedures). The work will be approached starting from a market understanding based on actual user requirements. The project is driven by a consortium of software development enterprises and users needing to heavily exploit information technology to retain their competitiveness in the evolving market. Users partners are all involved in business areas, ranging from medicine to the information service industry, which deserve fast and efficient management of large amounts of textual information. They will provide demonstrators based on their own business cases, which will permit to test the effectiveness of the basic concepts and to show the flexibility of the TREVI toolkit architecture in real-world, critical scenarios. The exploitation of the TREVI results will be mainly targeted at the business-to-business environment. Adaptation and customisation of the TREVI toolkit will allow TREVI customers to deliver several services either to SME's or individuals via public networks, or in "private" environments, i.e. integrated with internal communication systems within a large corporation. TREVI results will be particularly relevant for two categories of customers : - Information providers, information brokers, services providers, distributing and delivering services to individual end-users (subscribers) and SME's. - Large corporations, who can use TREVI as an enriched retrieval and dissemination product for knowledge which, at least partially, will be internal and confidential within that organisation. They will have to use external service providers eventually, but will be capable of implementing and supporting their own system and their own use of TREVI. Consumers for TREVI service may therefore include multinational corporations, bank, governments, media, telecommunications companies and new publishers (television, radio, press).