FP6 ECOSPACE

Projects /

The ECOSPACE project, funded under the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), aimed to develop a Collaborative Working Environment (CWE) to facilitate seamless collaboration among knowledge workers, particularly eProfessionals. Running from May 1, 2006, to April 30, 2009, the project was coordinated by Fraunhofer IAF in Germany.

ECOSPACE had four primary objectives:

  1. Innovative Work Paradigms: Analyzing eProfessionals and their organizational structures to define new collaborative work models.
  2. Open Standards Architecture: Designing and developing a service-oriented architecture based on open standards to ensure interoperability among diverse systems.
  3. Collaboration Middleware and Services: Creating middleware and services that enable seamless and instant collaboration among knowledge workers across organizational boundaries.
  4. User-Friendly Tools: Developing tools to simplify collaboration in dynamic work environments, empowering users to engage in creative and knowledge-intensive tasks.

The project employed a systemic approach, combining horizontal technology-driven activities with vertical application-driven initiatives. Four application areas served as “Living Labs,” acting as innovation incubators to foster broad acceptance of the project’s outcomes and create business opportunities for new products and services.

The consortium behind ECOSPACE was multidisciplinary, including large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), user groups, and professional communities with expertise in collaborative work, community building, mobile working, visualization, semantic web technologies, and social network analysis. The project contributed to the European Research Area (ERA) by linking with national and EU initiatives focused on reference architecture and collaboration middleware activities. For a comprehensive overview of the ECOSPACE project and its contributions to integrated collaboration spaces for eProfessionals, refer to the publication “ECOSPACE—Towards an Integrated Collaboration Space for eProfessionals“.