Bringing the FREME e-Services to the Market

TURIN, Italy, 29-Sep-2016 — /EuropaWire/ — FREME,  a 2-years project co funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation with the goal of developing a commercial-grade open framework of e-Service for the multilingual and semantic enrichment of digital content, is entering the final stage of its evolution. The first year was mainly focused on technical development, driven by the technology partners DFKI, InfAI and Tilde, to make the six e-Services running and available for testing to the project’s business cases and to third parties. The second year started with a focus on moving the effort from the infrastructure to market. This means that the four FREME’s business cases on digital publishing, translation and localisation, agriculture and food domain, and personalisation (i.e., lead by iMinds, Vistatec, Agroknow, and Wripl respectively) together with ISMB – that is managing dissemination activities within the project  – started a concrete marketing campaign with two-fold objective: validate the FREME open framework, and validate the business viability of the proposed innovations with real potential customers. For these reasons, all the business case have been working closely with the project’s specialists on business models to identify the best strategy for bringing FREME innovations into the market before February 2017, and interesting results are coming to light. iMinds will showcase  at the world-wide main event for publisher – the Frankfurt Book Fair in October – its last development of the FREME-enabled plugin for the CKEditor. Vistatec just launched on the market the “Deep Content” solution, a new product powered by FREME that helps make content enrichment services usable by content driven organizations. The announcement roused a lot of interest from both existing and new clients. One significantly interested party was the Common Sense Advisory – a localization industry consultancy – who posted a very positive blog post after having Deep Content demonstrated to them. Wripl Technology is working together with the ADAPT research centre – an excellency centre which spans four leading Irish universities (i.e., DCU, UCD, TCD, and DIT) – to integrate FREME within ADAPT and evaluate further development. In this press release, we focus on Agroknow – the company working on the agrifood domain – and summarize their intermediate results in terms of business improvements.

Agroknow’s mission is to find, link and deliver agriculture and food data worldwide. They help organisations to build a better future for all of us by working close with them to identify a common need  for improving data management and making data discoverable. This is how the idea of #WESUPPORT services was born (http://www.agroknow.com/agroknow/we-support), where a team of experts is serving each customer separately and help them to realise their organisation’s vision through four categories of services, namely: 1) Strategy, that focuses on the definition of the strategy for an open data product, 2) Design, that focuses on  the design of an open data service , 3) Build, focusing on activities for the development of the open data product using open standards, open source and open data (semantic enrichment services based on FREME e-Services are used to enable the linking and sharing of data), and 4) Engage, aiming atincreasing the impact of an open data service, by engaging both the end users and the data providers.

During the last 2 years, Agroknow has been working on the integration of semantic enrichment services powered by FREME within the suite of #WESUPPORT services. While working with 15 customers, FREME e-Services have been used so far in 5 #WESUPPORT contracts (with 5 new customers) to enrich metadata by adding new semantic annotations for topics based on AGROVOC, locations based on Geonames and Geopolitical ontology, researchers based on ORCID, and Organisations based on VIAF. The revenue from #WESUPPORT services grew by 25% in 2015 and by 50% in 2016. Agroknow aims at increasing the growth up to 75% until the end of 2017.

Agroknow is currently evolving the #WESUPPORT services by integrating more semantic enrichment services powered by FREME, and is developing a specific marketing strategy on this to approach new customers. In addition, Agroknow plans to participate in 3 industrial events related to open data, namely Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition Summit, International Open Data Conference and Open Data Institute Summit. This should translate in new opportunities to get in contact with new customers until the end of the project.

For further information please contact us at info@freme-project.eu or subscribe to our newsletter.

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