Advanced authoring environments for the creation of novel forms of interactive and expressive content enabling multimodal experimentation and non-linear story-telling.

These environments will ease content sharing and remixing, also by non-expert users, by automatically tagging content with semantic metadata and by using open standards to store it in networked repositories supporting symbolic and similarity-based indexing and search capabilities, for all content types.

Collaborative automated workflow environments to manage the lifecycle of novel and legacy media and enterprise content assets, from the acquisition of reference materials to the versioning, packaging and repurposing of complex products, including their linguistic and cultural adaptation to target markets and user groups.

Empirical results from the psychology of human perception and attention will be used to identify salient multimedia segments and apply summarisation and encoding schemes that will improve content storage and transmission without affecting its perceptual properties.

Architectures and technologies for personalised distribution, presentation and consumption of self-aware, adaptive content.

Detecting and exploiting emergent ambient intelligence they will use features embedded in content objects and rendering equipment to enable dynamic device adaptation, immersive multimodal experiences and contextual support of user goals and linguistic preferences.

Privacy preserving learning algorithms will analyse user interactions with devices and other users so as to update and effectively serve those goals and preferences.

Actions geared towards community building, intended to stimulate cross-disciplinary approaches and a more effective user/supplier dialogue, and other measures, including field validation and standards, aimed at a faster uptake of research results.

Usability and technology assessment studies, economic analyses and roadmaps to chart the democratisation of personal and community based multimedia production and management tools.

Semantic foundations: probabilistic, temporal and modal modelling and approximate reasoning through objective-driven research moving beyond current formalisms.

Theoretical results will be matched by robust and scalable reference implementations.

Usability and performance will be tested through large scale ontology mediated Web integration of heterogeneous, evolving and noisy or inconsistent data sources ranging from distributed multimedia repositories to data streams originating from ambient devices and sensors, supporting real time resolution of massive numbers of queries and the induction of scientific hypotheses or other forms of learning.

Advanced knowledge management systems for information-bound organisations and communities, capable of extracting actionable meaning from structured and unstructured information and social interaction patterns, and of making it available for activities ranging from information search through conceptual mapping to decision making.

Such systems will exploit semantics embedded in multimedia objects, data streams and ICTbased processes, and rely on formal policies to manage user access as well as audit trails in support of dynamic virtual organisations.

Research advances will be embedded within end-to-end systems using computer-tractable knowledge in support of dynamic data and application integration, automation and interoperation of business processes, automated diagnosis and problem-solving in a variety of

Robustness, scalability and flexibility will be tested in real-life settings, together with interworking with legacy systems.