The National Archives, Sweden (RA)

The National Archives' (Riksarkivet) commission by law is to preserve, organise and care for the records in order to uphold the legal right of access to public records in the pursuit of justice, continuity of public administration, and facilitating of research. Since 1970 an increasing number of records transferred to the National Archives are in electronic form, and long-term preservation of digital objects is, therefore, an issue of great importance for the longevity of the Swedish cultural and scientific heritage.
The National Archives has been a partner in several EU projects like EUAN, MINERVA, MinervaPlus, MinervaEC, QVIZ, and LEAF, is also taking an active part in European coordination efforts concerning digitisation and digital preservation.

In January 2006 Luleå University of Technology established a national competence centre for long-term preservation. Partners in this centre are also the Swedish National Archives, the Swedish National Library, the Swedish National Archive for Sound and Moving Images and the municipality of Boden. Three main areas of activities have so far been identified: scientific research; development of models, methods and tools; and knowledge enhancement. On a more practical level two main questions has up to now dominated the agenda: (1) the availability and accessibility of multi-sourced and multi-formatted digital resources and (2) the preservation of complex, dynamic and very high volume digital objects, including those with high levels of interactivity.

In the PROTAGE project the National Archives will be the coordinating partner, primarily utilizing the Swedish Centre of competence for Long-Term Digital Preservation. National Archives will also lead WP6 Demonstration and take major parts in WP4 and WP7

Luleå University of Technology (LTU)

Research and education at the University are primarily applied and interdisciplinary in nature, and conducted in close co-operation with industry. LTU is a partner in many EU FP6 projects. The university provides the legal body for the National Competence Centre for Long-term Digital Preservation and the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology, which is leading the launch of the European Network of Living Labs. The Computer and Systems Science Division at LTU specializes in research and education on information systems and the role of information- and communication systems in development and management of knowledge based organizations. The research is focused on information and knowledge management. At present, ongoing research is mainly concentrated to four areas: Long-term Digital Preservation, Communication and co-operation, Games and Simulation for Learning, and Information Security.

Within the area of Long-term Digital Preservation, the activities cover digital long-term preservation for archives, libraries and museums, and strives for solutions common for all cultural sectors. Together with a close cooperation with technical developers and experts in other related fields of interest, this provides for a unique strength in the preservation field.

In PROTAGE LTU will appoint the Scientific Coordinator and lead WP1 "Models and Methods Research". LTU will take part in all research activities and will be considerably active in WP2 and WP5. LTU will establish a Master's Programme as a result of the PROTAGE project.

National Archives of Estonia (NAE)

NAE is a government agency and a system of state owned public archives,including the Film Archives. It is the leading authority in Estonia in the field of long-term preservation, both for born-digital and digitized content. NAE is officially acknowledged as the Estonian competence centre for mass digitization from microfilms. It is actively participating in the process of issuing guidelines regulating the use of governmental datasets, document management systems, use of digital media, metadata generation and appraisal processes. NAE is also participating in the QVIZ project ("Query and context based visualization of time-spatial cultural dynamics").

To reach the goals of PROTAGE the NAE is collaborating with the National Library of Estonia (NLE). The NLE has extensive experience in digital preservation of publications and is also actively participating in The European Library and TEL-ME-MOR projects.

The NLE and NAE have been closely collaborating in developing the Estonian national strategy for digital cultural heritage and are taking collaborative efforts to standardise and simplify the generation, description and use of Estonian cultural heritage.

NAE will appoint the Technical Coordinator, lead WP 4 "System and User Tests", and take a major part in WP6.

Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (FRAUNHOFER)

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the largest organisation for applied research in Europe. Its purpose is to transform scientific results into innovative products and processes of direct utility to private enterprises and of wide benefit to society. Within the framework of the European Union's technology programmes, the FHG is actively involved in consortia that seek to improve the technological competitiveness of European industry. Affiliated research centres and representative offices in Europe, the USA and Asia help to maintain an international standard of scientific work.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT (FHG IDMT) work in the fields of Affective Computing, Vital Signs Monitoring, Knowledge and Content Management, User-Centred Design, Performance and training technologies, and is striving to set new standards in the fields of context-based metadata and development of user-friendly interfaces. FHG IDMT actively participates in several EU funded projects such as PHAROS, DIVAS, SHAPES, EDCine, SemanticHiFi, Carrouso, THEIERE, EIESurveyor, MetaStore, etc. FHG IDMT experts play an essential role within the field of standardisation in various fields (ISO SC29 (MPEG), ISO SC36, IEEE LTSC, etc.).

In PROTAGE FRAUNHOFER will lead WP5 "Evaluation and Update", and take major part in WP1.

EASY Innova (EASY)

EASY Innova is a SME focused on research, technology transfer and development of intelligent agents and is concerned with the development and analysis of AI techniques and control architectures for both single-agent and multiple-agent systems. Currently they are applying these particular properties to personalised agents.

The objective of EASY Innova is to develop intelligent agents with flexible behaviour in order to generate knowledge from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data and meta-data. Data are acquired through simple interactions from users (i.e. customers and/or organizations) with multi-agents systems (MAS). They possess wide expertise in the technologies of User Models and Customer Intelligence; Smart Multi-agent Architectures; Privacy and Trust and Electronic Institutions and Auctions.

EASY Innova works closely with the ARLab (Agents Research Lab), a well-recognized research laboratory from the University of Girona and the TLab (Transfer Lab), a technology transfer laboratory belonging to the EASY Centre for Technology Transfer of the University of Girona. The latter is certified by the CIDEM IT Network of the Catalonian Government.

EASY Innova has a wide experience in the development of applications in the following domains of Recommender agents; Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) and Artificial Intelligence applied to e-Government.

In PROTAGE EASY Innova will lead WP2 "Preservation Agents Development".

University of Bradford (UNIBRAD)

The Digital Media & Systems Research Institute at the University of Bradford has a focus of multi-disciplinary research and technology innovations, providing internationally recognised expertise and excellence for digital media creation, processing, analysis, protection, transmission and system development. The Institute currently has more than 50 researchers working on various nationally funded and EU funded research projects like LIVE, MDS and EGSO.

Over the years, the Institute has established fruitful links and collaborations both internationally and nationally, ranging from the technology-oriented research to the media industry, which are represented by: (i) joint research projects and teaching programmes with the UK National Media Museum , (ii) Bradford Royal Infirmary for providing medical expertise and test medical images for research activities under bio-medical media; and (iii) well-established links with a range of Chinese leading research organisations, including Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, and Southwest University etc. The Institute is also well equipped with world-leading state-of-the-art facilities for research, development and innovations.

In PROTAGE UNIBRAD will lead WP7 "Dissemination and Use" and take major parts in WP1 and WP3.

Giunti Labs S.r.l. (GILABS)

Giunti Labs is a company in the Giunti Publishing Group in charge of designing and developing new services and solutions for technology based learning, content management and new media. GILABS R&D area focuses on the development of several research branches within content management information technology, e-Learning and e-Publishing.

Some specific R&D activities which GILABS is involved in are: Advanced and user-friendly human interface design and development; Design and development of software architectures for advanced XML-based content/knowledge management; Design and development of web-services based portals and Context-aware, location-based, content management and delivery services for cultural heritage applications.

GILABS is well-known at European level, especially in the field of multimedia research & development and professional training, being very active in European Commission projects and activities, such as work groups, conferences, coordination meetings, direct services to EC DGs as well as FP5 and FP6 IST Projects (ARTISTE, EASEL, IEYE, KOD, IMAGEN, JUST, UPLOADED IT, I-MASS, SCULPTEUR, MOBILEARN, WEARIT@WORK, AXMEDIS).

GILABS core business includes the definition of new generation architectures for the integration of e-Learning and content and knowledge management (based on RDF, RQL, J2EE technologies, JMS asynchronous communication protocols).

In PROTAGE GILABS will be leading WP3 "Multi-Agent Preservation System Development" and take major part in WP2.