HOPS

Barcelona is one of the major European metropolises, with more than one and a half million inhabitants. The Barcelona City Council is strongly involved in the e-government process using the Internet as an instrument to achieve three main strategic objectives: to improve internal management; improve commit-ments to the citizen; and develop a participatory strategy.

The TALP Research Center for technologies and applications in language and speech (TALP stands for Tecnologies i Aplicacions del Llenguatge i la Parla) is a Specific Research Center of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), committed to technology and applications of the natural language pro-cessing techniques. The Natural Language Processing Group of TALP is involved in HOPS.

iSOCO (Intelligent Software Components S.A.) is a privately held company founded in 1999 as a spin-off of the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. iSOCO is the leading Spanish company in Se-mantic Web technologies, evidenced by its participation in several large, ambitious (international) R&D and commercial projects in this area.

The City of Turin is the main town in the Piedmont Region, a highly developed area in the NW part of Italy. Turin area has over 0.9 million inhabitants settled on 130,17 Km2. The local PA, and in particular the Municipality of Turin, has a strong role in the process of redesigning the town with a strong commitment in supporting the development of the digital economy.

CSI Piemonte is the main body representing regional Public Administration in the field of information technology and telematics. It carries out research activities, develops technologically-advanced products and services, design applications and information systems.

CSP is a non-profit ICT Research Centre, recognized by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Scientific Research. Its shareholders include: local government, Universities and industrial organiza-tions. CSP targets are technology transfer and the Information Society implementation through a strong synergy with academic institutions, private business and local government.

Leveraging 30 years of cutting-edge R&D, Loquendo provides everything necessary for the ultimate spee-ch-interaction experience. Loquendo’s patented technologies (TTS, ASR, Speech Suite, Speaker Verification) and platforms guarantee best-of-breed solutions in 16 languages/35 voices. With its headquarter in Italy, it has activities spanning Europe, U.S. & Latin-America.

The Università degli Studi di Torino was founded in 1404. It includes 14 Faculties and 55 Departments, covering all Humanities and scientific fields, for 60.000 students. The Dipartimento di Informatica was established in 1970. The Natural Language Processing Group has carried out research (since 1978) on Syntax, Parsing, Development of linguistic resources, Psycholinguistics models, Semantics, Dialogue, Agent modelling, Ontological models of agents, plans and normative behaviour.

The group at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is widely recognised as the leading group in the field of knowledge engineering. It has ample experience with libraries of reusable conceptual components, such as problem solving methods and ontologies, using and producing (meta-)descriptions of problem solving competencies, wrapping of problem solving competencies into agent architectures and the (dynamic) deployment of these reusable components in new applications. In addition UvA has chaired the develop-ment of the OWL language.

The London Borough of Camden - Camden Council - is a local government authority employing around 6.000 people to provide a wide variety of services to 190.000 residents as well as large numbers of those visiting working or studying in the area. Camden also acts as a conduit for governmental services and supports a range of voluntary sector organisations providing specialist services.

Runtime Collective has been integrating and supporting enterprise applications for clients in London since 2000. It works with open source tools in a way that enables to deliver robust solutions that adhere to indu-stry standards. Using open source also ensures that our on-going relationships with clients are based on continual delivery of a quality service, rather than vendor lock in.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- “The Network Is The Computer” -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web.

Grupo IT-Deusto was founded at the end of 1999 as a merger of different independent ICT Spanish companies and it is one of the biggest independent IT companies in Spain. The company’s main areas of activity are in the following sectors: Telco, Financials, Public Administration, Industrial, Utilities and Distribution, with an important portfolio of customers.