Software Integration, Research & Development
Promoter has wide technical background and expertise in the areas of portal development, application security, ontology management, database management, web-oriented and object-oriented programming (C++, Java, PHP among others), Web Services development, digital preservation, Digital Rights Management and IPR Protection.
Recently Promoter's technical activities opened also to Content Management Systems (CMS) web design and development and to the analysis of adaptive user interfaces (AUI), i.e. user interfaces which adapt and change their layout and elements, based upon the needs of the user or the context and which are similarly alterable by each user.
Promoter owns also an acknowledged skill on Ontology Management and Semantic Web technologies. This is mostly focused on the field of IPR metadata modelling. In particular, Promoter's staff presented in the last year a domain ontology which focuses on Digital Rights Management and aims at providing a comprehensive conceptualisation of the basic relationships and entities in the Intellectual Property Rights field. The ontology aims to identify all possible rights associated to a digital work and to enable the formulation of algorithms running on contents, metadata and background knowledge. It can allow to recognise possible rights violations and changing rights situations in digital archive materials.
Promoter's staff participates to research activities in the domain of adaptive services and interactive environments, e.g.: personalised information retrieval and presentation which respond to models of user and contextual intent; community-aware adaptivity which responds to the wider community interest; content-aware adaptivity which responds to the entities and relationships automatically identified within concerned data; personalised dynamic storylines which are generated across individual as well as entire collections of data.
Another domain of competence at Promoter is in the ambit of metadata standards for representation of digital content. In particular, Promoter is involved in the design and development of mapping systems to migrate between different metadata schemas. This technology applies in particular to data aggregation projects, with a special focus on the implementation of europeana.eu, which is one of the flagship initiatives of the Digital Agenda for Europe.
Finally, Promoter is involved in research activities in the area of the e-infrastructure enabled platforms for open science, development of e-Science Gateways to facilitate the access to computing and storage facilities (grid) and identity federations to improve authorisation and authentication mechanisms for virtual research communities.
