Consortium Synthesis / Transnationality Balance

The OASIS Consortium consists of 33 Partners from 11 countries, 2 of which are Newly Associated States (Romania, Bulgaria), and 2 are non-European (China, Mexico), thus ensuring a wide spread of results.

Other European represented countries are : Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

The OASIS consortium is in an excellent position to work towards the realisation of all of the target objectives related to ICT and Active Ageing, because all key actors are present, namely industries, telecommunication providers, industrial SMEs, Research centres, Universities, end-users organisations, an association of cities and a healthcare center.

All of them provide highly complementary input with respect to:

• End users’ representation (AGE, MCA); they will make sure that the end-user stays central during the whole project.
• Technological development work in all the scientific fields required (PHILIPS, CERTH, ITACA, PTV, MIZAR, SIEMENS, VODAFONE, MOTOROLA, CRF, FhG, UniBremen, UNEW, SILO, DOMOLOGIC, ANCO, FORTH, CONNCEPT SWISS, eWORX, UNIPI, INFOTRIP, ATCROM, CTAG, NETSMART, ITESM, TU, UPM, INNOVALIA, WKK).
• Infrastructure (pilots sites) enabling the demonstration and evaluation of the OASIS applications (PHILIPS, CERTH, FhG/IESE, UNEW, ATCROM, MCA, CTAG, ATAF).
• Wide dissemination and exploitation of the project outcomes and promotion to third parties such as other industrial fora, standardisation bodies, Policy makers and Public Administrations (notably in the Social Security, Domotics, Ontologies, HCI, and Care Domain) at national and trans-national level (AGE, POLIS, MCA, all industrial partners, large academic partners).

Many industrial partners function both as industrial users and strong software developers in the Consortium: PHILIPS, SIEMENS, MOTOROLA, VODAFONE, CRF, MIZAR, DOMOLOGIC for example have large research and development activities in ICT and Ageing.

All these industrial partners together are extremely knowledgeable in:

• stakeholder requirements (from all end-users’, service providers’, content providers’, device and software manufacturers’ perspectives);
• the technical requirements for the OASIS Open Reference Architecture and applications (including integration on all platforms and devices addressed in the project);
• domains including sensors, Consumer Electronics, PC, mobile communications and devices, info-mobility services, automotive devices healthcare and home automation;
• development, buy-in, integration and testing of software (embedded or not) for CE, PC, household appliances and mobile devices.

All this industrial knowledge is combined with strong expertise of research institutes, universities and industrial SMEs in research and development of:

• knowledge representation, ontologies, semantic web services and agents technologies from UniBremen, CERTH, SILO, eWORX, ANCO, and INNOVALIA;
• architectures, security and seamless service provision from Fraunhofer IESE, ITESM and NETSMART;
• innovative, user-centred services from Fraunhofer IIS, UNEW, ATCROM, including info-mobility services (PTV, INFOTRIP, CTAG) and health monitoring / supporting services (ITACA, UPM, CONNCEPT SWISS);
• unobtrusive, natural user interface technology from Fraunhofer IAO, FORTH , TU and MULTITEL.

In most cases development teams encompass mixed teams of industries and/or SMEs and Research Centres and/or Universities, thus guaranteeing a good transfer of knowledge from the basic research to industrial prototypes.

All the above Actors will be supported by a Scientific Advisory Board composed by independent experts with very wide recognition in their respective fields. With its large expertise, the SAB will ensure that the OASIS Consortium is kept up to date with current trends in the market, latest studies and other findings on user needs and requirements, as well as technological trends and standards (emerging technologies and trends that could influence the strategy of the OASIS Project). Thus, the SAB will ensure that the OASIS results conform with the ERA objectives and will contribute in pointing out possible ways of solving fragmentation problems of research in Europe.