IST World is a Specific Support Action project funded within IST in the Sixth Framework Programme by the European Commission.

The objective of the project is to set up and populate an information portal with innovative functionalities that helps to promote RTD competencies in IST in the New Member States (NMS) and Associate Candidate Countries (ACC) in order to facilitate and foster the involvement of different research entities in joint RTD activities.

The IST World portal is built on the CERIF standard and will contain information about RTD actors on the local, national and European level, such as persons, research groups, organisations and projects, and their experience and expertise. The portal will improve upon existing on-line services by offering innovative functionalities on top of the information repository:

Collaboration Diagram Competence Diagram Expertise Identification Partner Finding Social Network Identification Forecasting / Prediction

http://www.ist-world.org/

The IST World target user groups are organisations from all countries looking for specific RTD competencies, organisations from NMS/ACC wishing to promote their own competencies, and service providers. The information structure of the portal is suitable for representing personal and organisational competencies, expertise and social networks. Web forms will be provided for easy self-registration of RTD actors and web mining techniques will be employed for automated updates.

The portal is based on techniques and tools developed in previous and current research projects. Advanced techniques for automatic data acquisition, classification, knowledge extraction, trend detection and prediction are being implemented as services to support partner search for IST proposals and commercial projects. Techniques from social network analysis will be used for trust net monitoring, authority identification, community identification and monitoring, and prediction of community evolution. Moreover, IST World will offer a service for community building and maintenance.

Extensive promotion activities will be carried out, and a suitable business model will be proposed to ensure the sustainability of the portal services.

The IST World project started on April 1st, 2005 with a duration of 32 month.

	IST World is kindly supported by the European Commission. Contract no.: FP6-2004-IST-3 - 015823
	The IST World collaborative Portal is hosted by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).