The research aims at developing techniques and methods for the diffusion of "networked enterprises" among the Italian Small and Medium Enterprises, testing the proposed approach in association with companies working in two test fields (food and textile/fashion) during all the phases of the project, from the initial definition of requirements to the development of prototypes/ demonstrators, through a flexible and iterative process, where the technological development advances together with knowledge acquisition and with the refinement of network mechanisms.
To pursuit such results, the research consists of three macro-goals: Organization and business models for networked enterprises; Acquisition, modeling and automatic management of business knowledge derived from heterogeneous sources, including natural language; Technological autonomic pervasive infrastructure, based on smart peripheral devices (WSN and RFID).
At the moment the autonomic platform (in particular, the integrated workflow engine) has been definied; the methodologies and ontologies, in the context of the information extraction activity have been developed; the HW technologies for the project case-studies have been have been selected.