The project aims at facilitating and augmenting individual and organisational learning in Communities of Practice (CoPs). Towards this aim, an interoperable and extensible set of innovative services as well as a set of specific scenarios of use will be designed, implemented and thoroughly validated in CoPs of diverse contexts. The above services and scenarios will support: (i) incremental convergence towards a comprehensive representation of practices; (ii) argumentative debates about practices; (iii) enhancement of practices through knowledge exploration, inside and outside of the CoPs; (iv) provision of procedures for the reification and creation of new practices. To realise the above goals, PALETTE’s R&D process adopts a participative design approach, establishing a good balance between technological and pedagogical experts. Evaluation is integrated in the same process, in order to provide direct, frequent and detailed feedback. It is expected that the adoption of the developed services and scenarios will result to the: facilitation of tasks performed by learning CoPs by removing barriers imposed by current approaches; exploitation of diverse mental models, knowledge resources and competences of each CoP’s member through the social interaction of codified and tacit specialist knowledge; uncomplicated creation of new knowledge, which can lead to the evolution of the associated learning resources; easy access and reuse of knowledge built by CoPs; increase of active participation of individuals in CoPs; emergence of new CoPs, inside and outside organisations; increase of the overall quality of learning in CoPs.

ShipDismantl: Cost Effective And Environmentally Sound Dismantling Of Obsolete Vessels STREP, IST FP6-2003, Transport-3 Call, TST4-CT-2005

This research project aims to: (i) Develop innovative dismantling and recycling procedures consisting of optimal design of a prototype ship dismantling site, and optimization of ship breaking facilities and dismantling processes with respect to environmental and energy issues, cost, as well as occupationally hazards concerns. The above will also be applied to cases concerning basic improvement of already operational ship breaking yards, which may be active in full or partial dismantling. (ii) Develop a Decision Support System (DSS) for the ship breaking industry, which will be released free of charge to all stakeholders worldwide. The DSS will take into consideration the existing capacity and dismantling methodology of a given ship breaker, the type and the particular characteristics of the dismantling ship, and diverse third parties reports (including the inventory report of hazardous material on board), and it will outline the dismantling process in an environmentally sound, cost and energy effective way, taking into consideration the health and safety of the workers. (iii) Support the decision of acceptance of a given obsolete vessel for dismantling at a given site based on the comparison of the available against the required infrastructure. (iv) Validate the proposed tools and methodologies through a real case study.

This project concerns the development of an innovative Evidence–Based Medical Information System, which will support a series of integrated services related to the effective management and exploitation of Health Information, Clinical Knowledge and Practice. The need for this project is further validated from the assumption that health care is largely information and communication dependent, while ICT solutions can provide easily accessible and cost effective ways of meeting this increasing dependency. The proposed system will provide a wide range of users (medical doctors, health care professionals, health policy makers, patients and citizens) with the opportunity to access, process and produce evidence-based medical information. More specifically, it will provide: (i) Flexible mechanisms for capturing, retrieving and analyzing clinical practice and information, which may be stored either in the proposed system’s Knowledge Base or in remote (national or international) medical databases (these mechanisms concern all types of users); (ii) A user-friendly framework for e-collaboration and evidence-based medical decision making, through which medical doctors will be able to exploit already registered knowledge and conduct argumentative discourses in an effort to determine diagnosis and optimal treatment under a specific set of circumstances; (iii) Mechanisms for the exploitation of registered clinical knowledge towards the development of clinical guidelines for medical doctors and their associated staff; (iv) Mechanisms for the exploitation of registered clinical knowledge towards the identification of critical Preventive Medicine and Health Promotion issues.