• Project Dates: From January 2006 to December 2009
• Staff: Feng Li, Ron Jamieson and Joan Harvey

EU FP6 Integrated Project. Total funding: 2.2 million EURO. Newcastle University’s share: 355,239 EURO (with Ron Jamieson of RCID and Dr Joan Harvey of Psychology at Newcastle University)

IMPORTNET will contribute to cross-enterprise interoperability between proprietary systems and cooperation across engineering domains through the sharing of knowledge. Therefore the main objectives of IMPORTNET are to develop methods and IT-tools for the integration of distributed legacy systems; an semantic application server which supports the development of business services regardless of the location of the data; and a method and IT-tool for domain depending visualisation of engineering data.

The project aims to promote breakthrough research and technological developments on “Providing an open-source environment and operative models for digital business ecosystems for SMEs”. The development of an open source semantic integration framework aims to facilitate an affordable cross-organisational co-operation for SMEs and will operate in dynamically changing work environments. The framework forms the basis for an open and participatory environment that offers various applications to support the set-up of and work in networked organisations. Whilst the duration of the project a community of users and developers will be promoted to establish further future technological advancement and spreading of the framework’s methods and tools.