October 27, 2009 DSV submitted a project proposal to Information and Communication Technologies Calls: FP7-ICT-2009-5 . Eriks Sneiders was the main author and the coordinator. Participants:
– Fraunhofer-Institut für Software- und Systemtechnik (Germany)
– Stockholms universitet (Sweden)
– Health on the Net (Switzerland)
– Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
– Sabiedr?ba ar ierobežotu atbild?bu Tilde (Latvia)
– Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny w Poznaniu (Poland)
– T-Systems (Germany)
– BARMER Ersatzkasse (Germany)
Abstract
The Internet is known to be an outstanding tool for acquiring information and services. However, there exist three gaps that hamper the process of content acquisition performed by users. The first gap is the accessibility of buried content connected with the length of the path users have to follow to acquire the content. The second gap is the people’s inability to use existing tools to access content caused by cognitive discrepancy between developed tools and users’ perception and preferences. And finally, information overload caused by large amount of information, less time to process information, and complexity and ambiguity of information.
The goal of the AQUA project is to reduce all three gaps. The project will deliver technologies that will provide the shortest possible path between users information needs and the content (by providing high quality answers to questions and advancing cross-lingual question answering research area), take into account cognitive characteristics of users (by developing a user-centred knowledge representation and using it within the information delivery process) and will shield a user from information overload (by developing user-centred and context-based information supply mechanisms).
AQUA will use medical information as a test bed as this is a domain where: people need exact and reliable information; there are a huge number of adequate and inadequate information sources on the Internet providing lots of data, and finally, where faulty or incomplete information may have serious consequences for the individual. The content for the AQUA system will be inter alia HONcode members (6 800 health sites in 72 countries) approved for medical accuracy by Health on the Net (HON) as well as medical insurance data.