Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge
D6.1.3: Revised Dissemination & Exploitation Plan (M18) Dissemination level CO
Project ref. no FP7-ICT-4-248458
Project acronym Monnet
Start date of project (duration) 01 March 2010 (36 Months) Document due date 31 August 2011 (M18) Responsible for deliverable SAP AG
Reply to [email protected]
Project reference no. FP7-ICT-4-248458
Project working name Monnet
Project full name Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge Document name
Security (distribution level) CO
Contractual delivery date 31 August 2011 (M18) Access Restricted
Deliverable number D6.1.3
Deliverable name Revised Dissemination & Exploitation Plan Type Report
Version Final WP / Task responsible WP6 / SAP (Susan Thomas) Contributors Project Administration, partners EC Project Officer Michel Brochard
Distribution List Consortium Partners
Review list Consortium Partners
Approved by Project Administration, Consortium Supervisory Board
Table of Contents
1
INTRODUCTION ... 5
1.1
STRUCTURE OF THIS DOCUMENT ... 5
2
METHOD TO PLAN FOR THE USE AND DISSEMINATION OF FOREGROUND ... 6
3
PROJECT OUTCOMES ... 6
3.1
ONTOLOGY LEXICALISATION SERVICE ... 6
3.2
ONTOLOGY LOCALISATION TOOL ... 7
3.3
CROSS-LINGUAL ONTOLOGY-BASED INFORMATION EXTRACTION SYSTEM (CLOBIE) ... 8
3.4
CROSS-LINGUAL QUERY &PRESENTATION SYSTEM ... 9
4
PROJECT OUTCOMES AND AUDIENCES ... 9
5
DISSEMINATION STRATEGY AND PLANS ... 11
5.1
PROJECT WEB SITE ... 12
5.2
COLLATERAL MATERIAL ... 12
5.3
EVENTS &PUBLICATIONS ... 13
5.3.1
Dissemination of Scientific Output ... 13
5.3.2
Dissemination of Exploitable Outcomes ... 15
5.4
CONTRIBUTION TO STANDARDS ... 22
5.5
COLLABORATION WITH OTHER PROJECTS AND PEOPLE ... 25
5.6
CROSS-LINGUAL INTEREST GROUP ... 27
6
EXPLOITATION STRATEGY ... 29
6.1
OVERVIEW OF EXPLOITATION OPPORTUNITIES OVER TIME ... 30
6.2
GLOBAL ENTERPRISE EXPLOITATION ... 30
6.3
SMEEXPLOITATION ... 31
6.4
THE CONTRIBUTION OF XBRLEUROPE TO EXPLOITATION ... 32
6.5
MARKET OVERVIEW ... 32
6.6
STRATEGY FOR DEVELOPING DETAILED EXPLOITATION PLANS ... 33
6.7
DESCRIPTION OF METHOD TO DEVELOP PLANS ... 36
6.8
SUMMARY OF EXPLOITATION STRATEGY ... 39
1
INTRODUCTION
This document is the Revised Dissemination & Exploitation Plan, and represents the interim results from Task 6.1 of WP6 Dissemination and Exploitation. The main objective of WP6 is to maximize the impact of the project by means of targeted dissemination, collaboration, standardization and the preparation of exploitation plans. This revised plan explains the project mid-term strategy and the planning for activities in these areas. These activities prepare the ground for concrete plans for commercial exploitation of the project results.
The dissemination and exploitation plans will be continuously updated in the project Wiki (https://dev.deri.ie/confluence/display/monnet/Home). In addition, the updated plans will be made available at the end of the project, month 36. The scientific dissemination activities will be recorded in the form of a written report. A separate report will be created at the same time for continued industry dissemination and exploitation.
Originally, it was planned to create detailed commercial exploitation plans at month 18. However, a number of interesting challenges arose, which require more research and discussion. A key inherent challenge to exploiting Monnet is the development and maintenance of domain-specific multilingual linguistic data of various kinds like lexica and corpora. This data will change over time, potentially at a fast pace. To make exploitation feasible, an owner of such data needs to be found. In addition, exploitation requires a partner who has the skills to use the data to create effective translation services, and also to host them, for those who do not want to run them on their own premises. These challenges imply that commercial exploitation may require finding a set of exploitation partners, and identifying a commercially viable business plan involving these partners. This is a task which will yield different partners for different domains. In Monnet, this investigation is limited to scenarios in the public sector and financial reporting. On-going investigations will be documented on the project Wiki.
See https://dev.deri.ie/confluence/display/monnet/Monnet+Exploitation.
1.1
Structure of this Document
This document is structured as follows. First, the method used to plan for the use and dissemination of foreground is explained. The rest of the document then describes the results of the planning: the expected outcomes from the project, the expected audiences for them, the strategy and plans for dissemination, and, finally, the strategy and provisional plans for exploitation.
2
M
ETHOD TO PLAN FOR THE USE AND DISSEMINATION OF FOREGROUND
To plan for the use and dissemination of project outcomes, a two-stage approach was used. In stage one, through a series of dialogues, an initial common understanding of the intended project outcomes was reached. The project outcomes are by nature a moving target, since they are expected to change over the project lifetime in response to new technologies, socio-economic developments, and feedback, either from participants in dissemination activities or from discussions with potential beneficiaries.
In stage two, after the initial description of outcomes was agreed upon, all partners considered how these outcomes might be used, by whom, and for what. This enabled the identification of audiences and messages for dissemination. It also prepares the way for later exploitation.
3
P
ROJECT
O
UTCOMES
The project outcomes, as currently understood by the project members, are described next as a set of software components.
From the point of view of potential beneficiaries of Monnet, the project will produce four main components:
1. An Ontology Lexicalisation Service 2. An Ontology Localisation Tool
3. A Cross-lingual Ontology-based Information Extraction System (CLOBIE) 4. A Cross-lingual Query & Presentation System
All of the components can be used stand-alone. Note that although the focus is on ontologies, in principle other models could be turned into ontologies, so that the results are potentially applicable to other types of models.
3.1
Ontology Lexicalisation Service
This service takes as input an ontology, and produces as output a monolingual lexicon for the ontology. One way of understanding this service is to say that the output, the lexicon, enables a verbalization of the ontology, in the language of the labels or concept names in the ontology. To subsequently obtain a lexicon in a different language, a localisation service is used.
To create the lexicon, the service, in effect, creates a linguistic model, conforming to a model called the lemon ontology, and inserts the names extracted from the ontology into the appropriate places in the model. This model is linguistically rich, including morphosyntactic
information and other linguistic relations. Technically, the lexicon is an ontology called an ontology-lexicon, consisting of lexical entries which associate names and linguistic structures with the classes, individuals and properties of the input ontology. An example of a linguistic structure is a sub-categorization frame which specifies the number and types of arguments of a particular verb.
The input ontology remains independent of the lexicon, so that it is possible to have multiple lexicons for one ontology, either in the same or in different languages.
Availability
An initial version of the Ontology Lexicalisation Service is publically available as a demo at http://lexinfo.net
Assumptions made by the service
The main assumption made is that the label has been designed in such a way that the service can create appropriate lexical entries by linguistically analyzing the label. Labels can come from various parts of the ontology. The service tries to find SKOS labels, then standard RDF labels and, if unsuccessful, it uses the local names of the URIs as labels. This cascaded processing is necessary to achieve robustness.
Uses for the lexicon
It can be used as the basis for ontology verbalization.
It can eventually be used as the basis for natural language queries and presentation of results in natural language.
It is also a first step to ontology localisation, information extraction and cross-lingual querying and presentation.
3.2
Ontology Localisation Tool
This tool can be used to automatically or semi-automatically localise the linguistic information associated with an ontology from an original (source) language to a target language, where the linguistic information is given in the form of a lemon lexicon. Here localisation primarily means translation, and user means translator, reviewer or localisation manager. However, there are some technical aspects related to locale, so the term localisation is still applicable.
Given a lemon lexicon in a source language, a new lemon lexicon in the target language is to be created. The tool guides the user through the lexical entries in the source lexicon, making ranked suggestions for translations into the target language. In general, a lexical entry might be
represented by a word, a phrase or a clause. The user can accept the translation suggested by the system, can modify that suggestion, or enter a new translation.
Availability
A demo of the preliminary version of the Monnet ontology localisation system LabelTranslator is available as part of the eu.monnetproject.labeltransaltor at the DERI server.
Assumptions
It is assumed that a source-language lexicalisation has been done, so that a lexicon for the source language exists at the start of the translation from the source language into the target language.
Uses for the Localisation Tool
This tool accelerates the translation process of ontologies and improves the quality of the translation.
This is also a necessary step towards cross-lingual information extraction, querying and presentation.
3.3
Cross-lingual Ontology-based Information Extraction System
(CLOBIE)
This is a system to create information extraction (IE) rules to extract facts and entities from text. It also uses the rules to extract facts from text or semi-structured sources, and store them in an RDF knowledge base (KB). The repository is for the time being stored at DFKI within a reasoning system, called HFC (see D.3.3.1).
Availability
Users (in-house only currently) can access the HFC server through a Web browser: http://claymore.dfki.uni-sb.de:8102/monnet-hfc/
Assumptions
The extraction rules are derived (semi-) automatically from the Lemon models for the ontology. Thus, extraction is focused on the domain covered by the ontology.
Lexicalisation creates synonymous lexical entries (including semantic and morphosyntactic variations) that are useful in information extraction.
The main use case requiring IE is the XBRL use case which concerns companies and their financial statements.
Uses for CLOBIE
This system populates a KB of interest to experts in the domain covered by the ontology.
3.4
Cross-lingual Query & Presentation System
This system enables application developers to quickly localise applications using translated lexica and to query resources with ontologies in different languages. It consists of:
1. A method for integrating lemon lexica in a traditional localisation method.
2. A natural language generation system for developing text from multiple ontology predicates.
3. A methodology for finding alignments between vocabularies in different languages and a system for integrating this with the ontology query language SPARQL.
Knowledge access is cross-lingual in the sense that users can query in different languages and get the same results from a shared KB, even if ontologies in different languages are used.
Availability
Currently, the components LAIF and COAL are available (see also D4.3.1). LAIF is available as a stand-alone system. An initial version of COAL is available at http://monnetproject.deri.ie/coal Assumptions
A lexicon in the user’s language is available. It is needed for two purposes: 1) to translate the user query into a language-independent form; 2) to translate language-independent answers into the user language.
A KB with facts of interest has been created. This KB must correspond to the ontologies which are lexicalised by the user’s lexicon.
Uses for the system
The system can be used to submit form-based queries pertaining to the domain covered by the ontology and the KB.
Another use for this system is to view XBRL instances in multiple languages. This is useful for analysts who need to work with reports in a language other than their native language.
4
P
ROJECT
O
UTCOMES AND
A
UDIENCES
Research & academic community: Monnet will disseminate the approach and results of the project to the broad research and academic community, at a European and International level, through means such as participation in and organization of relevant conferences, workshops, invited talks and publication of papers.
Government agencies: Monnet will present the outcomes of the project to government agencies in Europe.
Business community: Monnet will introduce the project to selected IT and other high-tech companies through focused bilateral meetings and trade shows, in order to explore future exploitation possibilities. Business Intelligence (BI) and financial services companies are a special focus for dissemination.
Industrial and Non-Profit Associations: Monnet will engage in dialogues with relevant industrial and non-profit associations which could benefit from the Monnet outcomes. Of particular relevance here are the various XBRL communities.
Translation, terminology and localisation community: Monnet will seek a two-way dialogue with this community, which represents some potential users of Monnet lexicalisation and localisation.
General public: A number of Monnet dissemination activities aim at creating awareness of the project among the general public.
Other avenues of dissemination are collaboration with other projects or research initiatives, and contributions to standardization bodies.
Table 1 gives a bird’s eye view of the relationship between project outcomes, audiences and channels. More detailed plans are to be found in Section 5 of this document.
Project Outcome Audience: Channels
Ontology Lexicalisation Service and Lemon Model.
Researchers: academic publications, presentations, organization of workshops
Standards bodies like ISO & W3C: meetings or events Translation Community: workshops or events
Companies with semantics-based products: trade shows, publications
Localisation Tool
Researchers
Companies & Translators: trade shows, especially those for documentation (tekom, http://www.tekom.de/ ) and translation
Government Agencies and their Constituents: trade shows like the SAP Public Sector Summit, town hall meetings XBRL Community: meetings or events
Standards bodies that create multi-lingual standards: meetings or events Other Projects CLOBIE, including Methodology, Integration, Evaluation and Applications around cross-lingual BI Researchers
Business Intelligence Companies: BI trade shows or events
Financial Services Companies: FS trade shows or events Government Agencies interested in BI
XBRL Community Other Projects
Cross-lingual Query & Presentation System
Researchers
Companies & Government Agencies which need cross-lingual access to information: trade shows and other events or meetings
XBRL Community Other Projects
Table 1 Outline of Audiences and some Channels for Dissemination
5
D
ISSEMINATION
S
TRATEGY AND
P
LANS
The project partners consider early and wide dissemination to be very important, since feedback from messages delivered to various audiences can make the project members aware of opportunities that might otherwise be missed.
To effectively disseminate the innovations of the project, a dissemination plan encompassing the project outcomes, audiences and communication channels will be maintained over the course of the project. The plan, which follows, is organized by the type of communication channel:
the project web site, collateral material, events & publications, standardization,
There are two primary types of audience for dissemination: scientific and industrial. An important part of the dissemination strategy is to develop messages tailored to the audience.
In all cases, the project members plan to use the communication channels in two-way mode, collecting as much feedback as possible in order to tune the outcomes to meet real and important needs.
Another important two-way communication channel is the Cross-lingual Interest Group (CLIG), which is described in Section 5.6.
In addition, Monnet industrial partners will monitor the relevance of emerging technology trends, such as SaaS (Software as a Service), for the exploitation of Monnet project outcomes.
5.1
Project Web Site
A major communication channel between the project and the outside world is the Monnet web site, which is up and running at Be Informed: http://www.monnet-project.eu/
It acts as a public showcase for demos of the uses cases in Public and Business Services being developed by the project, as well as other Monnet tools and resources (Ontology-Lexicon model, Ontology Localisation, CLOBIE, Cross-language Knowledge Access and Presentation) and ‘by products’ (Multilingual Ontology Library, XBRL Document Translator, etc.), including open source development access where relevant, enabling outreach to the wider R&D community. The website also hosts all information on project partners, events, deliverables, publications etc. The project web site caters for two audiences: the scientific community and industry. Web analytics software is used to track the usage of the web site by these groups. Tracking provides a window on the progress of dissemination, and also allows the recognition of opportunities for improvements to the web site.
5.2
Collateral Material
The creation of collateral information like posters, videos and flyers is ongoing during the lifetime of the project.
We already implemented the following: a high quality, roll up poster that is very general and can be used over the whole project period of three years; separate smaller posters aimed at the academic and industrial audiences, respectively; a brochure incorporating information for both academic and commercial audiences. The smaller posters and the brochure will be updated as the project progresses.
Also a video will be produced by Be Informed to promote Monnet (resources for this are allocated in the budget).
In addition, two different basic standard presentations have been prepared, one aimed at a scientific audience, the other aimed at a commercial audience.
5.3
Events & Publications
This section is subdivided by the primary target audience, mainly academic for scientific outputs, and mainly commercial for outcomes.
5.3.1 Dissemination of Scientific Output
The strategy for the dissemination of scientific output is mainly concerned with scientific publications. The strategy for the release of open source software from academic partners is, on the other hand, covered by the exploitation strategy.
The main principles of the dissemination strategy for scientific output are:
partners will individually, or jointly, plan their publications, choosing the high impact conferences and journals which are relevant to their scientific results
the project’s Research Supervisory Board (RSB) will coordinate and prioritize scientific publications to ensure that the messages coming from the project are consistent, and achieve high visibility.
In addition to scientific publication, partners also plan the dissemination of results by the following means:
posters and talks at events organized by the European Commission.
organization of international workshops, such as the workshop series on the Multilingual Semantic Web, the first two of which were organized by Monnet partners at WWW2010 (http://msw.deri.ie) and ISWC2011 (http://msw2.deri.ie)
organization of an international workshop focusing on multilinguality and ontologies at Schloss Dagstuhl1 - around 40 renowned experts in relevant fields have been invited to participate in the workshop to reach consensus on important challenges in this emerging area and to contribute to the definition of a research agenda and common vision - as the work performed in the Monnet project will provide a starting point for many discussions, it will represent an important scientific dissemination activity for the project
1
organization of tutorials on Monnet topics at international conferences, e.g. tutorial at ESWC 2011 on ‘Enriching the Semantic Web with Linguistic Information’
co-organization of summer schools, such as the European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW), in the organization of which UPM (Asuncion Gomez-Perez) has been centrally involved since 20032.
invited talks by project members at international conferences, workshops etc. inclusion of Monnet results in lectures or other learning materials
Monnet project partners participate in events of the EU Commission and FP7 projects as a good way to position Monnet in the international research landscape and to disseminate its results. In addition to information days, we already participated in events organized by related projects such as FLaReNet (Fostering Language Resources Network), and the META-NET NoE. Confer to Section 5.5 for a description of projects and people with whom Monnet collaborates.
Another important means of dissemination is participation in international evaluation campaigns (e.g. CLEF). Good evaluations in such campaigns can significantly boost the visibility of the project. In particular, we plan to organize a so called ‘lab’3 in the context of CLEF on the topic of ontology localization.
Other dissemination activities, which overlap with the more commercially oriented dissemination strategy described in Section 5.3.2, have already been implemented or are planned, for example:
interviews with the press or with Internet bloggers, such as with semanticweb.org press releases
communications to analysts
publications in relevant research communication outlets, e.g., DFKI Newsletter
company-specific channels, like SAP’s Developer Network, which is described in Section 5.3.2.3
This list of avenues for dissemination will be extended as the project progresses. 2 SSSW-2003 (http://minsky.dia.fi.upm.es/summerschool/index.html), SSSW-2004 (http://webode.dia.fi.upm.es/summerschool/), SSSW-2005 (http://webode.dia.fi.upm.es/sssw05/) 3 http://www.clef2010.org/index.php?page=pages/labs.html
The following sections contain, first, more detail about the overall strategy for publication, and, second, the current coordinated dissemination plans for the academic partners. At the end of the project, all the scientific dissemination activities will be recorded in the form of a written report to be delivered by month 36.
Note that non-academic partners also plan to publish scientific papers, but since this is not their main focus these publication plans are included in the plans for dissemination of exploitable outcomes.
5.3.1.1
Strategy for Publications
The scientific results and achievements of the project are disseminated in the scientific community mainly through standard publication channels at journals, conferences and workshops. We aim at publishing our results at conferences and journals with the highest impact, such as: Journal of Computational Linguistics (CL), the Journal of Web Semantics (JWS), the Journal of Applied Ontology, the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), the International Computational Linguistics Conference (COLING), the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), the International Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Conference (EKAW), the International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP), the European and International Meetings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, EACL), the International IEEE Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), etc. Application domain specific journals and conferences (eGovernment, business) are also targeted, e.g., International Conference on Business Information (BIS), International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systms (IJSWIS), International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web) All publications of research results will be subject to the terms of the Collaborative Agreement. All publications shall be presented with a reasonable period of notification to the Research Supervisory Board for approval. For publications that contain other partners Background and/or Foreground IP, the authoring partner will make available and seek approval for the others, of a full draft of the publication. Where confidentiality concerns are identified, both parties should reach a compromise within a designated time period. Notification and copies of all scientific publication will be made available by the Consortium Supervisory Board to other consortium members.
5.3.2 Dissemination of Exploitable Outcomes
The non-academic partners are primarily responsible for creating and tailoring messages for various business-related audiences from decision makers to potential end users of the project
outcomes. These messages may take the form of presentations at events or publications in various media. The generic term ‘activity’ is used to refer to both events and publications. Like scientific dissemination, business dissemination is planned either individually or jointly, as appropriate, and will be subject to approval by the project’s CSB.
The current plans for each non-academic partner are presented in the following sections in tabular form with two columns. The first column gives the activity name, date and location. The second describes the audience, the message and its relation to project outcomes or scientific outputs. To facilitate comprehensibility, the activities are categorized and presented in multiple tables. There is one table per partner per category.
5.3.2.1
Be Informed Events and Publications
Be Informed is an independent software supplier (founded 2006) that specializes in semantics-based solutions for complex and knowledge-intensive processes. It has a mature software product (the Be Informed Toolkit) which is used in over 25 different projects with Dutch public administration entities. The client base for this product is the main target for dissemination of Monnet results.
The role of Be Informed in Monnet is to make sure that the solutions developed in the project can indeed be readily integrated into their solutions (the Be Informed toolkit in particular). Be Informed will build on its strong expertise in its domain to guide the project and make sure that the results are exploitable from a commercial point of view in the mid-term. Dissemination to, and feedback from, its client base, as part of the use case development in WP1, will increase the degree of suitability for exploitation.
Be Informed's dissemination strategy is tightly linked to its goal of quickly commercializing Monnet results, and calls for a rapid and continuous flow of information to its sales force, existing client base and potential future customers. In addition, as an innovative company, Be Informed plans academic talks and publications. The dissemination plan is included in the following table.
Activity, Date, Location Description
Sales Presentations on-going The Be Informed Sales Force has been briefed about the Monnet project and will be equipped with a Monnet Summary in the standard sales kit.
Company Newsletter Articles on-going The Monnet project will be presented in issues of the Company-wide News Letter.
Research Workshop Monnet, Utrecht, 20
September, 2011 Research workshop with public government agencies (IND, UWV, LNV) with members of research workshop. Main goal is to find common ground between the practice of multilingual government services and Lexicalisation of ontologyies.
Based on the outcomes and impact of the first Research Workshop Monnet requests for a similar event next year have been made.
Annual Be Informed Customer Architectural Conference, Utrecht, 3 – 4 March 2011,
Next meeting : March 2012
Annual conference with customers where Monnet is presented as key example of innovative research in Be Informed approach to collaborate with the academic community in the area of multilingual services. Positive feedback received as this level of research is not commonly expected from SME’s. Table 4 Be Informed Dissemination Activities aimed at customers
Activity, Date, Location Description Talks at Dutch Universities,
Departments of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
On-going
Be Informed is regularly invited to Dutch AI departments to talk to students about practical applications of their field. We plan to include the Monnet project and goals in our talk. Sessions at Utrecht, Groningen and Nijmegen Universities are planned.
Practice of Enterprise Modeling, Oslo,
2-3 November, 2011 Specifying Flexible Business Processes using Pre and Post Conditions
Invited Keynote at Extended Semantic
Web Conference, Greece ,2012 To be determined.
Conferences, journals and other events to be determined
Suitable conferences, journals and other events will be targeted, e.g., events organized by the Dutch government, and conferences and journals focusing on semantics and/or e-government.
Activity, Date, Location Description Company Newsletter Articles
on-going
The Monnet project will be presented in issues of the Company-wide News Letter.
Poster in Be Informed Office A Monnet project poster will be hung in the Be Informed office as a permanent presence. Growing awareness of Be Informed
employees, on-going The Product Development department is very aware of the Monnet project because based on the discussion and results of the Monnet Project several Product changes have been made
Table 6 Be Informed Dissemination Activities aimed at employees
5.3.2.2
XBRL Europe Events and Publications
XBRL Europe’s main mission in the Monnet project is to define and to test use cases using XBRL in connection with live users. Hence, there is a need to communicate about the project objectives and results with these users. The first step concerns the definition of use cases, so users become aware of their needs. This will mostly focus on technical XBRL users (from business registers, banking regulators) who are creating XBRL taxonomies or managing XBRL workflows. XBRL Europe will communicate about Monnet within the framework of its existing technical working groups. These groups connect representatives from 25 European national registers, either via direct membership or through ECRF and EBR initiatives, 5 European-wide information providers, +20 european banking supervisors, either via direct membership to the working groups or through the CEBS / Eurofiling initiative) and a multitude of oversight bodies, such as the international Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and XBRL International with its international network of jurisdictions, each of them representing and communicating to their national members, active in supervision, government, registers, financial reporting, etc.
An inventory of 48 XBRL European projects in various sectors (Banking, Business Registers, Tax, Statistics, etc.) has been created by XBRL Europe and its working groups. As the great majority of them could benefit from translation, the Monnet project information will also be disseminated to the XBRL users active in these identified projects.
XBRL Europe will also disseminate information to a broader public, including XBRL end users such as legal registrars, analysts, accountants, so they become aware of the translation opportunities (multilingual reports), localisation opportunities (global comparability of local reports) and information extraction opportunities (tagging of data in reports) offered by Monnet. This part of the dissemination will be realized in coordination with the SAP Events and Publications described
in Section 5.3.2.3 of this document, as it may concern the same target, or spread the same messages. It will also be broadcast by the XBRL Europe marketing and communication events and publications, or during international conferences. XBRL International is a worldwide consortium of more than 650 companies, and approximately 500 participants come to each conference.
The link between ontologies and XBRL taxonomies concerns XBRL technical users and will be subject to theoretical presentations and workshops during XBRL Europe or XBRL International Events and Publications. This may include the participation of academic partners.
The forecast program to disseminate information to XBRL technical users and XBRL end users is the following (focusing on the 2011-2012 period):
Activity, Date, Location
Description
Monnet Flyer for XBRL people - presentation document
XBRL Europe will use the Monnet poster and main Monnet publications to provide an initial Monnet Flyer for XBRL people; this will present the project and its objectives. It will be prepared for March 2012 and broadcast during the meetings and on the XBRL Europe website (member pages)
XBRL Europe face-to-face meetings - started in Brussels on March 26th, to be continued in Paris on September 21st, 2010
- other meetings will be planned in 2011 and 2012 (approx. every 4 to 6 months)
Each face-to-face meeting includes a plenary session: an update presentation on the Monnet advancements will be organized during these sessions.
The face-to-face meetings also include working group sessions; presentations will be organized for these groups, including those who are not directly participating in the Monnet project (EU liaison, IFRS for stock-listed companies, usability, etc.).
XBRL European Business Registers working group meetings
- monthly meetings, mainly by telephone conference
The EU BR WG connects business registers from Europe, as well as information providers and commerce register organizations (ECRF, EBR); this group already actively participates in the XBRL-Monnet use case definition; and a XBRL-Monnet information point will be organized every two months XBRL Europe COREP/FINREP
Harmonization working group meetings
- during face-to-face meetings and during CEBS conferences
The COREP/FINREP Harmonization WG connects European banks and regulators; it is linked to the CEBS/Eurofiling effort; regular Monnet information points will be organized during the year
Monnet as a XBRL Europe working
group To give a better knowledge of the Monnet activity to the XBRL Europe members, the Monnet Project (XBRL use case) is identified as the 5th project in the Project Coordination Working Committee; it will therefore report its activity using the existing workflows in the XBRL Europe association
Activity, Date, Location
Description
XBRL International conference- takes place in Montreal, October 23-25, 2011
As some XBRL Europe members and Monnet partners will participate to this conference, they will take the opportunity to present the Monnet project to North American and international participants
XBRL International conference
- takes place in United Arab Emirates, March 20-22, 2012
This conference represents an opportunity to disseminate Monnet to the middle east and international participants.
Contributions to Educational activities in the field of reporting.
- Macerata, Italy, 8-9 September 2011
Financial Reporting in the 21st Century: Standards, Technologies and Tools
(http://frstt.unimc.it/index.php) XBRL Europe new working group about
Standard Business Reporting has started Monnet results will be considered from the very beginning of the work of this new initiative.
XBRL Europe website
- webpage coordinated with the Euromarcom working group
Information about Monnet (presentation, objectives and results) will be updated on the XBRL Europe website (open to all); the Euromarcom WG will help to publish the information (this working group organizes the marketing and communication aspects for the association).
XBRL Europe insight
- newsletter coordinated with the Euromarcom working group
Information about Monnet (presentation, objectives and results) will be given in the XBRL Europe newsletter; the Euromarcom WG will help to publish the information
Presentations in national jurisdiction - local antennas of XBRL International
XBRL Europe will communicate through its member jurisdictions to the national members in major European countries; presentation kits and news will be sent to these members at least twice a year
XBRL International Challenge Monnet intends to participate in the XBRL Challenge:
http://xbrl.us/research/pages/challenge.aspx Table 2 XBRL Europe Activities aimed at the XBRL End Users
5.3.2.3
SAP Events and Publications
SAP’s role in the project is to find uses for Monnet outcomes, i.e., to use Monnet to do entirely new things, or to do existing things better. Five main application areas for Monnet outcomes have been identified so far: localisation of products, multilingual financial reporting & use, multilingual service descriptions, multilingual information extraction and multilingual e-government portals. SAP focuses on the first four, while Be Informed focuses on the last one. Both companies will develop and disseminate messages about how Monnet can revolutionize or
improve working practices in these respective application areas. It is expected that other application areas will be added as the project progresses.
Dissemination organized by SAP can be divided by audience into public, SAP customer and internal, where internal communications are primarily tailored for a subset of the approximately 47,500 employees inside SAP, who will then spread the message to SAP customers and partners. Although the activities discussed here are organized by SAP, they may very well involve the participation of other Monnet partners.
There is a table of dissemination activities for each of the three targeted audiences: public, SAP customer, internal. In each table, the activities are ordered by time.
Activity, Date, Location
Description
Blog in the SAP Developer Network (SDN) On-going, periodically updated
(http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn) Internet
A blog about developments in Monnet will be posted in SDN, monitored and actualized. SDN is a public web site run by SAP for the benefit of partners, customers and potential customers. It currently has more than 1.3 million members. A short article in the SDN newsletter about Monnet is planned in order to increase the readership of the BLOG. Journal Article 2012 A journal article in a business or accounting
journal is planned to inform business people of the benefits of Monnet.
Table 3 SAP Activities aimed at the Public
SAP has a large and growing customer base, which is a special target for Monnet dissemination.
Activity, Date, Location
Description
Publications in SAP media SAP has a number of media suitable for publications about Monnet, among them are:
SAP World, SAP info, SAP News and the annual SAP Research Report The project plans to publish at least one article a year in a suitable media.
SAP Public Sector Summit 2012 A prototype of Monnet will be presented at the yearly SAP event for the public sector to showcase the XBRL Use Case for business registrars and their clients. Participation of XBRL Europe and/or business registrars is anticipated.
SAP German User’s Group (DSUG)
meeting 2012 Germany A preliminary prototype of Monnet will be presented to a selected group of German customers to get feedback. A Keynote or booth at a DSUG meeting is also possible for the presentation of more mature prototypes.
Activities aimed at customers will also be heard by SAP employees, but there are also a large number of potential SAP-internal activities of relevance to Monnet. The currently planned ones are listed in the next table.
Activity, Date, Location
Description
Presentations to Product Groups on-going
Europe and Internet
Monnet ideas and prototypes will be presented to various product groups inside SAP at various points to get feedback. These activities are especially important to get early feedback on the direction of the project. SAP Internal Publications
on-going Internet
Continuously updated material about Monnet will be made available inside SAP through various channels such as: the SAP research network (all SAP) or SAP insights blog (SAP Research only).
SAP Research projects on-going
Germany and Telco
Monnet lexicalisation services will be presented to SAP Research projects that have, or are developing, ontologies to see if they could benefit from Monnet.
SAP Developer Kick-off Meeting (DKOM) 2012
Germany and Internet
A very short demo of Monnet will be entered into a competition and/or will be presented at DKOM, which targets all SAP developers. One highly visible event is a competition of very brief, impressive software demos. An entry has the potential to attract the attention of thousands of developers, and eventually the SAP board.
Table 5 SAP Activities aimed at SAP Employees
Additional activities are under investigation, among them are publications in journals and channels used by banking or by the business intelligence (BI) product groups inside SAP. The engagement of important SAP partners, such as UBMATRIX, a vendor of XBRL software, is also under investigation. SAP is currently show-casing its XBRL reporting, using UBMATRIX, http://www.sap.com/about/investor/reports/xbrl_info.epx. This may also offer an opportunity for dissemination by Monnet.
5.4
Contribution to Standards
Monnet will also contribute to international standardization efforts, especially in the context of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Monnet will contribute towards developing a standard model for associating linguistic information across languages for standardized ontology languages such as RDF(S)4 and OWL5. It will also contribute to the “XBRL and Semantic Web” charter6, aiming
4
for formalizing the XBRL vocabularies according to current Semantic Web languages. We will contribute here our models that can be used to separate the taxonomies proper from the way that the relevant concepts are expressed in different languages. This will allow disentangling the XBRL taxonomies by clearly separating the conceptual and the lexical layers. This will yield more flexibility and modularity as the taxonomies will be developed and maintained separately of the conceptual framework and additional languages can be added into the lexical layer without affecting the latter. Our sound models for associating multilingual information to ontologies will then be used to capture the bridge between the conceptual and lexical layers in a principled manner. As we will build on ISO standards for representing linguistic data, the most representative ones being the Terminological Markup Framework (TMF7) (and the associated TermBase eXchange format; TBX8), which captures the underlying structure and representation of computerized terminologies, and the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF ISO/CD 24613) [Francopoulo et al., 2006] an abstract meta-model that provides a common framework for the representation of computational lexicons. Another ISO Standard of ISO TC37/SC4 will be used: SynAF (ISO DIS 24615) 9, for guiding the syntactic description of terms used in the multilingual ontologies.
We will also indirectly contribute through feedback to the further evolution of these standards, which we have done already in the past.
As said, a number of standards or standards organizations are relevant to Monnet. The following list represents the standards or organizations to which Monnet plans to actively contribute:
ISO TC37/SC4: In the context of ISO TC37/SC4 in which DFKI is an active member, the topic of Ontologies for Language Resources is currently a central issue, to which Monnet will contribute with the further development, integration and standardization of the LIR and LexInfo models.
5 http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ 6 http://www.w3.org/2009/02/xbrl-ig/charter.html 7 http://www.loria.fr/projets/TMF/ 8 http://www.lisa.org/standards/tbx/ 9
Declerck, Thierry; “A Framework for Standardized Syntactic Annotation” in Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation, May 2008, ELRA/ELDA.
ISO TC37/SC3, NWIP 22274 Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content -- Internationalization and concept--related aspects of classification systems, DFKI and UPM are involved in this standardization effort.
XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language): DFKI is contributing to a newly launched W3C interest group on XBRL and the Semantic Web. While the ontologization of XBRL can help in harmonizing the various taxonomies, or improving interoperability, Monnet will contribute mainly on the multi- and cross-lingual aspects, which will make XBRL instance documents of companies in a country available in a variety of languages. We further contribute to standardization activities in the XBRL community, in particular on the development of a Core Taxonomy, xEBR, (XBRL European Business Register). W3C OWL: Monnet plans contributions to W3C to further develop the multilingual
aspects of OWL based on the Ontology-Lexicon interface. NUIG, DFKI, UPM and SAP are W3C members (contributions also by UNIBI).
W3C CG ontolex: Participants of the Monnet Consortium have created a W3C Community Group on "Ontology Lexica". Community groups are a new instrument introduced by W3C which allows broader communities (including non-W3C members in particular) to contribute to the creation of standards. The goal of the W3C Community Group on "Ontology Lexica" is to work towards the specification of a lexicon model for ontologies, based on the work on lemon performed within the Monnet project. In this sense, it can also be regarded as a dissemination activity for work carried out in the context of the project. Beyond that, the goal of the community group will be to foster consensus in the community, thus paving the way for the specification of a W3C recommendation in the long term.
Other standards are relevant to Monnet in the sense that Monnet results should be compatible with them. Standards which fall into this category are:
OMG SBVR: OMG SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules from the Object Management Group) defines structured business vocabularies and rules specified using this vocabulary. SAP as a member of OMG is interested in ensuring inter-operability of this specification with other ontological and terminological standards. DFKI cooperates with OMG via a liaison implemented in ISO TC37/SC4.
OLIF, the Open Lexicon Interchange Format, an open standard for lexical/terminological data encoding. (www.olif.net ). SAP is active in OLIF and uses it, so is interested in ensuring that Monnet results are compatible with it.
The project members will continuously evaluate potential contributions to standards as the work progresses.
5.5
Collaboration with Other Projects and People
Monnet has already established working relationships with the following projects or organizations. World Health Organization WHO- ICPS (www.who.int/patientsafety/en/): UPM is
currently collaborating with the WHO in the development of an ontology for the International Classification for Patient Safety (ICPS). Since the WHO is an international organization with several official languages, their information systems need to support multilingual information. In this sense, Monnet outcomes could benefit their research. EuroMatrixPlus, based on novel combinations of statistical techniques and linguistic
knowledge sources as well as hybrid machine translation architectures (http://www.euromatrixplus.net/). Monnet will explore collaboration with EuroMatrixPlus to achieve best-of-breed outcomes in both projects – some of the partners have strong connections to this consortium (Thierry Declerck, Paul Buitelaar). NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative), the European
Technology Platform dedicated to Software and Services. (www.nessi-europe.com/Nessi/) Multilingual aspects are under-represented in the NESSI activities, which presents an opportunity for Monnet to contribute to NESSI whose overall goal is to transform the EU economy by means of service-oriented business models.
Centre for Next Generation Localisation (www.cngl.ie/index.html): The Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) based in Dublin, Ireland, is a so-called Center for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) with over 100 researchers developing novel technologies addressing the key localisation challenges of volume, access and personalisation. Their expertise in localisation will be leveraged by the Monnet project, and in turn, Monnet outcomes will be made available to CNGL for uptake in their research.
DELOS Network of Excellence (EC-funded, FP6, www.delos.info/) Monnet will seek contact with this network as there is also a focus of implementing multilingual services for content management in the context of digital libraries. By establishing a dialogue with the DELOS Network of Excellence, we hope to get an understanding of i) the challenges addressed, ii) the solutions developed so far and iii) the main bottlenecks encountered so far concerning multilingual information access.
ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm: We will also closely analyze the results and outcomes of the projects carried out in the context of the eContent Plus Program and especially in the follow-up Information and Communications Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP). A running eContent Plus project of particular relevance for MONNET is FLaReNet (www.flarenet.eu/), to which we will deliver information about the generated lexical resources of MONNET. Of special interest to Monnet will also be the results of the study on Language Barriers in the Information Society funded in the context of eContent Plus as it will likely have an important influence on the project.
Accurat (www.accurat-project.eu/): Monnet will have access to parallel or comparable corpora provided by ACCURAT.
Kyoto (www.kyoto-project.eu/): Both projects can benefit from an exchange on best practices in ontology lexicalisation.
Multilingual Web, Theme 5 of the ICT-PSP Work Programm (in particular objectives 5.1-5.3) (www.multilingualweb.eu/): The MultilingualWeb project is exploring standards and best practices that support the creation, localisation and use of multilingual web-based information. Monnet will contribute practices around the localisation of ontologies and other models. SAP participates in the Multilingual Web Project.
IGN-E: The IGN-E is the Spanish National Geographic Institute, which is currently collaborating with UPM in the development of ontologies to serve as a harmonization framework among Spanish cartographic producers. In this scenario ontologies need to support multilinguality because of different regional languages spoken in Spain. Their work could benefit from Monnet outcomes.
Buscamedia (www.cenitbuscamedia.es) A Spanish research project whose purpose is to make advances in the domain of multimedia technologies based on semantics. Ontologies have to be lexicalised and translated to all languages that share official status with Spanish in Spain, which are Catalan, Galician, or Basque.
iGreen (igreen-projekt.de/)A German research project to link a network of public and private sources of knowledge on food crops, which has a need to translate between German and English.
META-NET: MONNET dissemination efforts will benefit from close cooperation with expected activities of META-NET10 (Technologies for the Multilingual European
Information Society) Network of Excellence. The META-NET language resource infrastructure will be used as a primary channel for distribution of open source tools and resources developed by MONNET. MONNET will use opportunities to organize joint events, presentations, online and printed publications and other activities that will be possible in the META-NET NoE framework.
Net2: The Net2 project is a Research Network for Enabling Networked Knowledge funded by the EU Marie Curie program. In the Net2 context we are working with the University of South-Africa and the MERAKA research institute on extending the language coverage of the Monnet use cases to Afrikaans and other indigenous languages of South-Africa.
Future IP/STREP Projects and Networks of Excellence for Objective ICT-2009.2.2: Language-Based Interaction: Monnet will continue to explore possibilities for collaboration with the future IP and STREP projects on Machine Translation. Contacts have been established to many new projects present at the EC Village at LREC 2010 (www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2010/?EC-Projects-Village).
The form of collaboration will be tailored to the type of relationship between the projects. Thus, collaboration will range from intense cooperation, e.g., co-organization of meetings and workshops, to simple cross-linking of information which is to be made available to members of both projects.
5.6
Cross-lingual Interest Group
The Cross-lingual Interest Group (CLIG) consists of parties external to the consortium and is drawn from relevant scientific communities such as machine translation, multilingual terminology management, from standardization organizations such as W3C and ISO and from companies and public bodies that hold out the possibility of being future consumers of Monnet technology output. Susan Marie Thomas (SAP) chairs the group and is responsible for organizing CLIG meetings.
More specifically, the function, tasks, size and budget of the CLIG are as follows:
10http://www.meta-net.eu/
- Function: act as an integrated Industry and Scientific Advisory board, responsible for
generating interest in and educating the wider IT and scientific community on the project goals, output and its uptake
- Tasks: review key deliverables, provide critical feedback on the project scientific and
commercial directions, ensure that the consortium is kept current in relation to market developments and scientific progress
- Size, Membership: 6 members drawn from science, standardization organizations, industry
and public bodies. Current members are:
o Prof. Gerhard Budin, University of Vienna, chair of terminology studies and translation technologies; director (faculty dean) of the Center of Translation Studies at the University of Vienna; chair of ISO/TC37/SC2 on Terminographical and lexicographical working methods
o Prof. Josef van Genabith, Language and Intelligence Research Group, School of Computing, Dublin City University; director of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation o Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead at the W3C
o Francesco Bellini, Senior Partner at Eurokleis s.r.l., currently leading the ICT committee of the Italian Association of Chief Financial Officers that is studying the perspectives of XBRL and liaises with XBRL Italy to set the standards.
o Daniel Brockmann, product manager for terminology at SDL, a world leader in global information management, including translation http://www.sdl.com/en/
o Gerard Hesselink, Dutch Government, ‘Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken’
- Budget: included in NUIG budget allocated for travel (€20,000)
The CLIG will meet three times during the project lifetime. CLIG members will provide feedback from the viewpoints of scientific research development, standardization efforts, and dissemination and exploitation opportunities.
o First CLIG meeting at M13: was attended by 3 members of the CLIG (Budin, Bellini, Hesselink). The consortium presented research, technology, and standardization results. CLIG members reviewed and commented on Monnet research direction, scientific output and commercialization opportunities.
o Second CLIG meeting at M25: to be attended by 3 members of the CLIG.
In addition to the CLIG face-to-face meetings there will be regular telcos and screen sharing meetings.
6
E
XPLOITATION
S
TRATEGY
The exploitation strategy has one strand for each type of partner.
An open source strategy will be pursued by the research partners: NUIG, DFKI, UNIBI and UPM. The objective is to promote the uptake and advancement of the ideas and methods developed in the project by the rest of the academic community or by enterprising start ups, e.g., some of the companies from the Cross-lingual Interest Group described in Section 5.6. Open source is an important mechanism to attract the interest of potential customers, especially in the public sector, where open source is being widely used. The actual license types used on open-source components will be discussed and agreed upon by the CSB on a case-by-case basis.
A commercialization strategy will be pursued by the commercial partners SAP and Be Informed. The objective is to make direct and indirect contributions to the growth of European business by incorporating results from the project into commercially offered software products and services. Exploitation may take the form of product/service enhancements, new products or spin-offs. The process of exploitation is different for SAP and Be Informed due to their different markets and business models. SAP is a large global enterprise, whereas Be Informed is an SME. As representatives of these two types of enterprise, each has contributed a different point of view to the initially conceived exploitation strategy which is described in this section.
A process-improvement strategy will be pursued by the non-profit partner XBRL. The process to be improved is the localisation of XBRL vocabularies. XBRL, supported by the commercial partners, will play a major role in disseminating process improvements to other organisations active in creating standards. These improvements can significantly impact the way standards are developed, improving both efficiency and quality.
In addition, the academic partners, in particular UPM, will use the resulting Monnet methodologies and technologies as course material to be used with M.Sc. or PhD students. Since in some Spanish regions the Spanish language shares official status with other languages such as Catalan, Galician, or Basque, UPM will organize talks to SMEs or Regional Administrations that could be interested in the methodologies and architecture developed within Monnet for solving Multilingual Information Access problems.
There will be generic open source technology and APIs developed in the project (WP2 – WP4). The added value for commercial exploitation is the customization of this technology to the exploiter’s own needs and the integration into their own tools (Be Informed toolkit etc.), which will not be open source. There is thus no contradiction between our open source approach and commercial exploitation.
6.1
Overview of Exploitation Opportunities over Time
The following figure gives an overview of the general exploitation opportunities which have been identified so far, and which are described in more detail in the rest of this section.
Increase efficiency and quality of localization Use e-government in your language Enhance BI with cross-lingual capabilities Give Europe a competitive edge in emerging markets Enhance BI
for the Public Sector
Figure 1: Overview of Exploitation Opportunities over Time
6.2
Global Enterprise Exploitation
The results of Monnet can benefit any and all multi-national companies in Europe, since they all have very similar needs when it comes to cross-lingual information processing. For this reason, SAP can be seen as a representative of such companies in the project. Future exploitation by a global corporation can be divided into three phases: in the short-term improvements to terminology management and translation processes are anticipated; in the mid-term enhancements to BI software and search; in the long-term increasing the competitiveness of Europe in emerging information & service markets like the Internet of Services.
Short-term: localisation: Monnet aims to help global enterprises meet the enormous challenges they face in localising their products for different countries or regions. SAP, for example, supports 37 languages. To ensure uniform terminology and translation SAP extends and maintains a terminology database, SAPterm, which presently contains about 2.7 million main entries. This encompasses about 125,000 German terms and an equal number of English terms, plus the translations of these terms into other languages depending upon customer demand. SAP therefore represents an important opportunity in
disseminating and exploiting Monnet results in a wide industrial context and in promoting standardization proposals arising out of Monnet
Short-term: localisation and shared vocabularies: Monnet intends to encourage openness, sharing and collaborative development of ontologies and their localisations. The recent Microsoft Language Portal11 is an example of the sort of sharing that Monnet wants to encourage. Future collaborative maintenance of multi-lingual terminology, taking advantage of ideas and methods from Monnet, can have a big impact for Europe, improving the quality of communications across languages and cultures.
Mid-term: Business Intelligence (BI): There are two ways Monnet can advance the state of practice in BI. One is adding cross-lingual capabilities to text analysis. The other advance enabled by Monnet comes through improvements in the process of creating and localising XBRL. This is an indirect effect in that XBRL increases the reliability of the processes of analysing and exchanging the business data that is used in BI processes. Long-term: Increasing European Competitiveness in emerging markets like
the Internet of Services: Monnet contributes to this goal by meeting two major pre-requisites. The first pre-requisite of a successful community platform is an intuitive, yet powerful browse and search function to explore the services offered, so that they can be easily found, combined and used by anyone, not just IT experts. A second pre-requisite is that questions can be answered without consulting an expert who speaks the same natural language as the software vendor. In addition Monnet can also contribute to the goal of mining the usage logs to detect opportunities to either improve service descriptions or even opportunities to offer new services. A further benefit is that developers can browse or search for services in order to avoid redundant development. An on-going effort to define all aspects of services is the Unified Service Description Language, of which an initial version is available at: www.internet-of-services.com/index.php?id=12.
6.3
SME Exploitation
Some opportunities for exploitation by SMEs are indicated by using Be Informed as an example. In the Use Case of Be Informed, applications developed with the Be Informed Tools can benefit from automated localisation to better support end-users in multiple countries and/or ethnical backgrounds without the need for manual translation of the ontology and the embedded
knowledge. Further, the Monnet project aims at developing the “de facto” standard for associating multilingual information to ontologies. A further integration with standards like OWL and RDF, where the localisation of ontologies in Be Informed will better match proposed standards will support greater acceptance of the Be Informed solution in the field. Be Informed has a SOA based interface, to support integration with other applications, either locally, or somewhere on the web. In local applications a fixed set of supported languages can be anticipated. However, the public use of a SOA based application on the web calls for multilingual support. This also goes for any GUI based application available over the web, like e.g. the http://www.newtoholland.nl/ portal, the application under development for the IND (Dutch immigration), or a search service like on www.overheid.nl
6.4
The Contribution of XBRL Europe to Exploitation
As the primary standard for representing business data, XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) lays the foundation for business intelligence. XBRL is a royalty-free, XML-based open standard for identifying and better communicating the complex financial information in corporate business reports. XBRL has now emerged as the only global XML-based standard for financial reporting. After a European Commission funded project (FP 6 – “XBRL in Europe”) with an outstanding outreach, conditions for XBRL adoption are developing rapidly, particularly in Europe where a specific organization – XBRL-Europe, has been set up to enhance exchange between European jurisdictions. One of the main factors in Europe, which works against transparency in business reporting, is the need to shift from one European language to another, which heavily increases costs, and acts as a barrier to the internal market. Obviously, the Monnet project will provide crucial contributions to overcome this barrier, which will be disseminated among XBRL-Europe members.
6.5
Market Overview
Presently three directly relevant markets have been identified for the exploitation of Monnet technology: Public Sector, Business Intelligence (BI) and the incipient Internet of Services market. The market for translation software and services is also relevant. However, it is not a commercial business for the participating commercial organizations, but is rather a market whose services they utilize. SAP, for example, makes use of services from about 120 translation agencies around the world. These agencies could benefit from the outcomes of Monnet, which could improve their efficiency and quality, thereby, benefiting their customers. Therefore, a representative of such an agency, SDL/Trados, is a member of the Cross-lingual Interest Group.
Business Intelligence Market: Fortunately for the project, this market is more recession resistant than most markets, as companies scramble to achieve the insights that will enable them to survive. According to IDC the search and discovery software market, which is merging into the Business Intelligence market, will continue to grow despite the economic downturn. Furthermore, Monnet addresses the text analytics sub-area of this market that IDC describes as ‘hot’. BI is a large and growing market. At present the BI-platform market alone is worth over five billion dollars per year. According to IDC, Market leaders in this space are Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP.
Public Sector Market: The public sector is another area of the economy that is expected to continue spending, putting into action anti-recession Keynesian policies. This sector is a large market, compared to IT spending in other industry sectors it is also very significant as shown in the following figure.
Figure 2: Total spending on IT services by the public sector by geography
Internet of Services Market: This is an incipient market driven by the trends already described. Spending in this area may slow down temporarily, but is expected to pick up in the long term, partially replacing the current very large market for business software.
6.6
Strategy for Developing Detailed Exploitation Plans
As the project has progressed considerations of how to exploit the project outcomes have become a topic of debate and discussion, raising many interesting issues and options. This section discusses some of those issues and options, and lays out a strategy for developing detailed exploitation plans.
6.6.1 Deliverable Models: Productizing Monnet’s Technology
As a result of the analysis of user requirements in WP1, and discussions between commercial and academic partners, four options to provide Monnet technology to others have been initially identified:
1) as a download
2) as a web service for a specific domain
3) as a preconfigured software product for a specific domain 4) as a domain-neutral platform
As a download
The minimum scenario supported in the project is offering the developed software as an as-is download.
As a Web Service for a Specific Domain
The easiest way for professionals to adopt Monnet technology would be if it was offered as an online service. As Monnet technology depends on domain-specific corpora for training, the service should be offered for a number of relevant domains, including, for instance, Immigration and Financial Reporting.
As a Preconfigured Software Product for a Specific Domain
Alternatively, a download package could be provided which includes the necessary training data for a specific domain. This would enable interested parties to install their own translation server, allowing them to control the management process of the service.
As a Domain-neutral Platform
A fourth option is to make Monnet technology available as a domain neutral platform. This would allow advanced users and scientists to train Monnet to their own corpora, thus applying Monnet in new domains.
This would however, require documentation and tutorials and should probably be considered as advanced use. Explicit assumptions on the prerequisites in terms of linguistic knowledge would be required for users to be able to use Monnet in this way. Advanced usage can also apply to the utilization of alternative component implementations to cater for optimal performance in non-standard situations.
All options, except the download, have the inherent challenge of the ownership and maintenance of domain-specific multilingual linguistic data of various kinds like lexica, corpora and training
data for machine translation. This data will change over time, potentially at a fast pace. To make the other options feasible, an owner and maintainer of that data needs to be found, a challenge for commercialization.
Another challenge for commercialization is that provision of translation services requ
