Specific targeted research project in the sixth Framework Programme
IST Call 4: Strategic objective: 2.4.13 Strengthening the Integration of the ICT
Research Effort in an Enlarged Europe Contract no: IST-FP6-26476


The SEAMLESS (Small Enterprises Accessing the Electronic Market of the Enlarged Europe by a Smart Service Infrastructure) project is intended to study, design, develop and experiment an advanced ICT-based service to enable a well-identified category of small enterprises, the so-called Craft & Trade companies, to access the eBusiness space created by the Single Electronic Market of the Enlarged Europe (SEEM) and play an active role in establishing and running frictionless dynamic collaborations.

In order to realise the above perspective, it is necessary to study in four domains, namely collaboration framework, knowledge and languages, technological infrastructure and user-oriented applications:

Collaboration Framework
The Collaboration framework is intended to establish the rules for companies and users to access the SEEM, enter and update profiles and offers for possible partners, contact them, negotiate, exchange information and documents.

Knowledge and Languages
In order to make companies from different regions and sectors communicate, understand each other and finally collaborate, they must share concepts and relations between concepts. It means that the SEEM must rely on the existence of a common ontology and the mapping between its concepts and the ontologies of the different SEEM nodes.

Technological Infrastructure
The technologial internet-based platform is intended to ensure the required support to access, register, communicate, collaborate, and exchange information according to a peer-to-peer model.

Applications and services
According to the SEAMLESS approach, the applications take great advantage of the knowledge and the functions made available by the SEEM Service layer on top of which they are built: Intelligent search engine, negotiation support functions, collaboration support functions, integration with legacy systems.