INTRASOFT International S.A. is a leading European company in the area of Information and Communication Technology services. We have a broad portfolio of activities addressing a wide range of international and national public and private organisations. Our extensive service exposure offers innovative and added value solutions of high quality with measurable results for our clients. As a subsidiary of INTRACOM HOLDINGS S.A., INTRASOFT International S.A. was established in October 1996 to better serve western Europe, and has achieved impressive organic growth since then. INTRASOFT International S.A. has more than 800 employees in Belgium, Luxembourg, Athens and Romania, 20% of whom hold postgraduate degrees, representing 20 different nationalities and mastering more than 15 languages.

IBM Research India Since its inception in April 1998, the IBM Research – India — the youngest of IBM’s eight world-class globally integrated research labs — has grown significantly in technical leadership, accomplishments, and size. IBM Research – India has grown so significantly that the lab has expanded from one location to two - and today, both the sites in New Delhi and Bangalore are focused on delivering real innovations to business and society. IBM Research – India pursues a systematic study for understanding the fundamental aspects of phenomena with specific applications towards products or services in mind. The use-cases are derived from real-world scenarios within the environment, including the market dynamics of India and the activities of IBM in India. For example, global delivery of IT-based services, including infrastructure, application, and business process services, accounts for much of the services exported by India to the rest of the world. Similarly, telecommunications is a booming area within the Indian market, and there are unique opportunities for innovation based on insights in this market. Both these areas are strategic for IBM Research – India, where unique insights lead to innovation that matters. IBM Research – India brings to bear world-class expertise in many areas to address these kinds of real-world problems. Primary among these areas are information and knowledge management, systems management, distributed and high performance computing, software engineering, analytics and optimization and the emerging area of service science. The lab boasts a rich talent pool in these areas and an enviable culture of innovation. The ideas typically germinate from the cross-pollination of multiple scientific disciplines and insights into real-world needs. Innovation does not only emerge from inside the lab - but in this era of dynamic change, the best ideas sometimes come from external sources. Therefore, the lab’s innovation ecosystem extends beyond its boundaries. Researchers work closely with global teams in top universities, publish papers and create collaborative relationships through fellowships, grants and shared research programs. Some of this work is specifically targeted to create an open body of knowledge and intellectual property for communities to build upon. This creates a stimulating and collaborative atmosphere that encourages "out of the box" thinking mixed with scientific rigor.

ATOS is an international information technology services company. Its business is turning client vision into results through the application of consulting, systems integration and managed operations. The company’s annual revenues are EUR 5.5 billion and it employs 50,000 people in 40 countries. Atos is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic Games and has a client base of international blue-chip companies across all sectors.

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.P.A. , is the holder of Engineering Group, composed of 12 companies. It is financed by Italian private capital at 100% adn is working on IT since 1980 in 40 different locations in Italy, Europe and South America. In 2008 achieved consolidated revenues of about 700M€ with around 6500 employees, thus further consolidating the Group's position as the largest private enterprise in the system and business integration market sector in Italy and one of the most relevant at EU level for software and services. ENG operates in all market segments – banks, insurance, industry, telecommunications, defence, healthcare, central and local public administration, utility and strategic consultancy – offering in each segment technological expertise to develop and manage complex information systems for more than 800 client companies.

National Technical University of Athens is the most prestigious and most competitive technical education academic institution in Greece. The Decision Support Systems Laboratory (DSSL) is a multidisciplinary scientific unit within the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering that offers research and development, consulting and training services addressing a wide range of complex research and application problems. Operating for more than 25 years, the lab has acquired international experience in the following domains: Information Technology and Decision Support Systems with a specialization in e-Business and e-Government, Management Information Systems, Program & Project Management, Monitoring and Evaluation, Training and Human Resource Development, Information Dissemination and Promotion. In the scientific area of Electronic Government and Electronic Business, the lab pursues research and development of novel methods and tools, for boosting productivity of public administrations and businesses through the use of information and communication technologies. In this context, there is a strong and lasting collaboration with public sector organizations and businesses, academic and research institutions, from Europe, Africa, Asia and US. Acquired knowhow is channelled in the creation of vocational and academic training material, and the implementation of high quality academic work in the eGovernment and eBusiness domain.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) As the oldest university of technology in Germany, founded in 1825, and one of the elite universities in Germany, the profile of Universität Karlsruhe is determined primarily by the technical and natural sciences as well as by engineering. These academic disciplines are closely interlinked with the programs for economics, humanities, cultural sciences, and architecture at the university. The university’s widely recognized success is founded and consolidated on this spectrum of scientific excellence. Recently, the Universität Karlsruhe and the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe joined forces and merged into the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The KIT has roundabout 8000 employees and an annual budget of more than half a billion Euros. The Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) at KIT was founded in January 2008 as a public-private partnership between KIT and IBM. The KSRI implements an innovative industry-on-campus concept where IBMers collaborate closely with university researchers at the university site. The KSRI is dedicated to excellence in research and teaching in the field of Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME). The institute is led by three university professors and one IBM director, and comprises members of their respective research groups. Through its professors, the KSRI is already involved in many projects both on a national, European and international level. The KSRI further collaborates with the FZI Research Center for Information Technologies in Karlsruhe, where the three university professors also hold executive positions to drive ICT transfer programs.

Founded in 1987,Athens Technology Center S.A. (ATC) is Information Technology Company offering business solutions to the Media, Banking, Retail and Public sectors as well as horizontal solutions on Content Management, Web Applications, eLearning, Human Capital Resource Management and Mobile Applications. The activities of the Company span among several countries in EU, Eastern Europe and CIS countries, as well as the Balkans. Central to the Company’s strategy is the conduction of vivid Research and Development, focusing both in improving current Products and Solutions, as well as in exploring new technologies for future growth. The company has extensive experience from the coordination and participation in several projects like the following: project partner in eGIF -Greek e-Government Service Provision and Interoperability Framework; The project co-ordinator of the eParticipation project MOMENTUM - Monitoring, Coordinating and Promoting the European Union eParticipation Projects and Initiatives; The project co-ordinator and the main technology provider of the eParticipation project eMPOWER -Empowering citizens to influence the decision making and policy formulation on environmental issues; The project co-ordinator and the main technology provider of the FP6 project WEB-DEP -Western Balkans Democratic Participation; The project co-ordinator and integrator in the eParticipation project LEX-IS -Enabling Participation of the youth in the public debate of legislation among parliaments, citizens & businesses in the EU; A project partner in the eParticipation project FEED project -Federated eParticipation Systems for Cross- Societal Deliberation on Environmental and Energy Issues; The project co-ordinator of the FP6 project SODIUM -Service Oriented Development in a Unified framework.

The City of Venice (Italy, population of 270.000), as a local democratic government, exercises administrative actions and manages the services, activities and procedures concerning: culture, social welfare, sport, tourism, environment, civil protection, commerce, local rates, public and private building, education; it promotes the quality of life of its citizens, acting as a guarantor of person, family, pluralism, pacific cohabitation and differences of sex, race, language and religion values. In the last few years, one of the main objectives of the City of Venice Administration has been to increase the scale and impact of Innovation in order to improve public services and related policies. It has launched a lot of actions to develop ICT-based services, from the digitisation of the main City’s activities to the development of web 2.0 technologies to improve citizens participation (eg in the filed of urban maintenance, internal communication, planning of tourism flows, digital cartography systems, monitoring of the quality of services)

The Hellenic Ministry of Interior (YPES) is the outcome of the unification of three Ministries: The Ministry to the Presidency of the Government, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Public Order. The mission of the Ministry regarding Public Administration is planning and implementing government policy in the following sectors: • Organization of public administration at both central and regional levels and of local government (administration of first and second degree) i.e. Municipalities and Prefectures. • Management and development of human resources. • Modernization of Public Administration trough the use of information and communication technologies and improvement of the quality in services provided to the citizens (including E-Government).

Tilburg is the sixth largest city in The Netherlands. Tilburg Municipality has 200.000+ inhabitants, 2.000 employees, 120 km2. It has theambition to be one of the best service providers in local government as is formulated in our mission paper 'Tilburg - Toonaangevend in Dienstverlening' (Tilburg - leading in service). To realize our mission we implement information architecture as is designed by EGEM, the Dutch expert centre for e-Government, inspired by the central Government Program 'Andere Overheid'. Central component in this information architecture is the CRM (Citizen Relation Management) system, which is a (SOA compliant) service bus that connects our multi-channel front-office (website, call centre, etc) with the mid-office data-warehouse and the back-office workflow systems. The main function of the CRM is to registrate and dispatch customer (citizens) requests and to monitor the in time handling of requests according to pre-defined service levels. One special efficient and effective feature of the Tilburg CRM is the expert system that is designed to assist customers self service from the very beginning of contact. Virtual Cities Quite a different component of our eGovernment program is the use of a Virtual reality model of the public space of the city of Tilburg as a medium for communication and decision making in local government. 'Virtual Cities' has been awarded by the European eGovernment in Lisbon 2008.

The University of Tilburg participates in COCKPIT by means of the European Institute on Services Science (ERISS). The ERISS is a multi-disciplinary research institute of international stature. Members of the ERISS have coordinated and participated in numerous European and national projects dealing with several aspects regarding the design and development of state-of-the-art IT concepts, methodologies and tools which are able to access, synthesize, and reason about large volumes of distributed information across networked organizations. In particular, ERISS is currently serving as the scientific coordinator of the S-Cube Network of Excellence, and participating in the COMPAS project on compliance of service-enabled software systems. ERISS is interdisciplinary and is based on results of currently disjoint research fields, in particular service technologies, data and knowledge representation and modeling, distributed and interoperable systems and data bases, and, Web-2.0 technologies. These objectives are achieved through strategic research, advanced prototyping, technology transfer, and collaborative product development with industry and government agencies and by presentation of our results to the wider scientific community.