The IT Innovation Centre is an autonomous science-park-based applied research centre. Part of the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, we specialise in collaborative R&D projects to enable take-up of novel IT, particularly by industry and commerce. We research, develop, architect, engineer and integrate innovative IT systems. We provide consultancy services and deliver strategies, road maps, proofs-of-concept, demonstrators and novel operational systems.
Role in SANY IP:
Data fusion engines and services implementation.
IT Innovation has participated in more than fifty ESPRIT and IST projects over the past decade, providing project management services in 15 of them. IT Innovation employs some 25 people, all experts in their fields and most qualified to PhD level, with a wide range of experience in industry, commerce and academia. We deliver high quality and robust solutions, and we adopt standard software engineering methodologies and appropriate quality control processes, e.g. we are familiar with the Rational Unified Process and quality standards such as ISO9000. Our facilities are dedicated solely to our own projects, including our computer systems, which are based on a secure LAN.
We have detailed knowledge of the automatic generation of metadata and its use in search and retrieval from our work in the IST projects ARTISTE and SCULPTEUR. In SCULPTEUR we extended the metadata and content-based search and retrieval system from ARTISTE using a Semantic Grid approach. We are exploiting this work in the eCHASE project (electronic Cultural Heritage made Accessible for Sustainable Exploitation), where are developing new business models for commercialising archive assets, and developing search and retrieval portals that add value through contextualisation, aggregation and localisation.
IT Innovation has been working on distributed computing technologies (especially Web and Grid technologies) and their application and use since the mid-1990’s, and plays a major role at UK, European and world levels in projects focussing on the effective use of Grid technologies and services, specialising in business processes, workflow, semantics and security. At the heart of many of our current projects is GRIA: a Grid middleware developed by IT Innovation to enable the use of shared assets that are under different ownership or control in a secure, interoperable and flexible manner. GRIA open source software, and available from http://www.gria.org/. In the UK e-Science myGrid project we developed the Freefluo workflow enactor (http://freefluo.sourceforge.net/) which enables the use of workflows as a flexible and easily reconfigurable approach to using and combining information sources. In the IST ARTEMIS project, we lead the development of a secure Semantic Web Service-based P2P infrastructure for healthcare information systems that supports new ways of delivering electronic healthcare records to clinical staff across the boundaries of organisations. This work is directly applicable to many other information systems.
IT Innovation is familiar with the use of Open Source Software (OSS), and has a good understanding of development processes and IP management issues when using and extending multiple open source components with different licenses. We have contributed to UK Government Policy on OSS, and have developed an IPR management strategy for using third-party software (including OSS) within larger software systems.
Other IPs with participation of the University of Southampton:
i-MARQ: implementation and optimisation of the Fusion and Modelling Engine
