GIC visits MICROSOFT Research Centers in Redmond, US

Members of the Greek Interoperability Centre visited Microsoft Research Centers in Redmond, Seattle, during August 2009. Following a running collaboration between Microsoft Hellas and GIC, the teams exchanged research ideas and outlook for future interoperability standards and services worldwide, in the area of electronic Government and electronic business.

Yannis Charalabidis, Euripidis Loukis, George Kanellopoulos (MICROSOFT Specialist), Fenareti Lampathaki, Spyros Passas and George Gionis, in Microsoft Redmond

Semantic Week 2009, Amstelveen, The Netherlands

Yannis Charalabidis for the Greek Interoperability Centre served as the Keynote Speaker in the “Semantic Week 2009”, held in Amstelveen, The Netherlands, on June 22-26, 2009. His speech “A Collaborative View on Semantics” stressed the importance of collaborative methods and tools in the creation and formulation of semantics, especially in the age of social media and massive collaboration web sites. The Semantic Week was organised by STASIS and supported by a range of EU projects and initiatives including SOA4All, BREIN, COIN, NESSI, SEMIC.EU, the European Commission and the IBIS Journal.

More information at http://www.semanticweek.eu/

Semantic Week Keynote, June 23, Amstelveen, The Netherlands

Greek Interoperability Days in July 2009

The Greek IC organized the second Interoperability days event in July 2009, where prominent researchers and practitioners had the opportunity to address a selected audience of GIC researchers and members of GIC community in Greece. Prof. M.Janssen (TU Delft), Dr. M. Missikof (IASI-CNR, IT), Prof. R. Goncalves (UNINOVA, PT) and D. Osimo (Tech4i2) delivered several days of academic presentations, case descriptions and organized workshops targeting highly innovative approaches for semantic interoperability, Web 2.0, Future Internet infrastructures and B2B interoperability.

David Osimo (Tech4i2) in a Web 2.0 Workshop in GIC premises, Athens

Semantics Week in the Netherlands

Heading off to Amsterdam, where on Monday and Tuesday 22-23 June 2009 I will deliver a speech to the "Semantic Week" organised by fellow researchers and projects. In parallel to the semantic week, the ICE Conference in Leiden, with important events on Interoperability.

Seamless Security in 4th Regional Security Forum

The 4th Regional Electronic Security Forum was held on 6th and 7th November 2008, at Thessaloniki, Greece. Organised by INA Telecommunication Academy, the conference brought together experts and governmental officials from Greece and neighboring countries.

The main topic of the conference was electronic governance security. Prof. Gritzalis from Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) chaired the session on eGovernment Security, presenting the recent recommendations of the Security Committee of the Greek eGovernment Forum. Yannis Charalabidis presented a new idea on "Seamless Security" - the way to make digital public services secure and user-fiendly. Ray Nightingale from the Global Trust Centre gave new ways for achieving trust and security in eGovernance.

"Seamless Security" is emerging as a need, as more and more measures are affecting and generating significant costs for the final users. Through the eGOVSIM tool (a simulator for eGovernment Services from NTUA), important indicators on security burdens have been calculated and showcased. The model shows that, over the next 30 years, a typical, employed, ICT user - citizen will: –Obtain 100 different sets of authentication credentials, mostly electronic –Sign 10,000 times, on different documents, currently mostly manually – gradually shifting to electronically – Use his/her credentials not less than 100,000 times, mostly by inserting data into systems –Rely on his/her own means for storing, accessing and reproducing documents (more than 1,000 of which will have to be stored, many of which in paper) More on the presentation can be found here: http://www.inatelecom.org/