DFKI
	ICCS
	PLANET ERNST & YOUNG
	SEMA Group Belgium
	IKA
	DHC

	Information Management and Document Analysis (Head: Prof. Dr. A. Dengel);
	Intelligent User Interfaces (Head: Prof. Dr. W. Wahlster);
	Deduction and Multiagent Systems (Head: Prof. Dr. J. Siekmann);
	Intelligent Visualization and Simulation Systems (Head: Prof. Dr. H.Hagen);
	Language Technology (Head: Prof. Dr. H. Uszkoreit).

There are two additional subgroups, 

	the "Siemens Tele-Cooperation Center" which is part of the "Intelligent User Interfaces" group; and
	the research group "Knowledge Management" which comes under "Information Management and Document Analysis".

	formal knowledge processing (ontologies, knowledge representation and reasoning, logic-based inferences, formal agent communication principles, etc.),
	business processes, workflow & collaboration technology,
	document and informal knowledge processing (natural language processing, document analysis, information extraction, text classification, etc.).

Tools and techniques developed in this context support the automatic and semi-automatic structuring of information, the linking of documents and formal models for background knowledge, the acquisition, representation, and storage of organizational knowledge, and the sustainable maintenance of organizational memories. The research results have been presented in numerous publications. DFKI will contribute tools, modules, and prototypes from this collection to the DECOR project. 

INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS , NTUA

The Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) is a private law body associated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DECE) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). ICCS has been established in 1989 by the Ministry of Education in order to carry research and development activity in the fields on all diverse aspects of telecommunications systems and techniques, computer systems and their applications in a variety of applications such as electric power systems, software and hardware engineering, control systems and biomedical engineering.
The personnel of the ICCS consists of members of staff, research students and fellows of DECE/NTUA. The active research personnel of ICCS presently consists of 40 members of staff of DECE/NTUA, 25 additional senior researchers and 120 research students. The laboratories of ICCS/DECE are established by the implementation of several structural programmes such as Mediterranean Integrated Programme on Informatics of European Community (MIP-Informatics), MIP of Attica region, Public Investment and Special Development Programmes of the Ministry of Education and other incomes of the ICCS. The ICCS is ruled by a five member board and its activity are co-ordinated by the Director of Institute being elected by the Members of Staff of the DECE/NTUA.
The Information Management Unit (IMU) operates within Institute of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). IMU is an interdisciplinary Unit engaged in research and consulting activities which lie in the broad area of information systems (IS) management. IMU has a staff of 4 faculty members, 9 post-doctoral researchers and 14 engineers. The focus of IMU's activities is in identifying ways that private and public organisations can plan, use and manage information technology (IT), in such a manner as to strategically exploit the opportunities/possibilities of IT in order to reach, sustain and enable their target goals. 
IMU works on the issue of information management from three perspectives: the perspective of IS strategy, examining issues that refer to the: alignment of business strategy and information technology strategy, the design and deployment of IT to support/enable changing business strategies etc; the perspective of IS as decision-support and change-enabling tools, building on the assertion that information systems should be treated as an organisational change agent (related work includes the development of Group Coordination Systems and Office Information Systems); and the design and development of MIS and DSS (related work includes the development of Decision Support Systems (DSS) for energy and economic development planning). 
IMU has been active in the development of a research programme in Collaborative Technologies for Knowledge Management. Research areas include the creation and application of technological knowledge infrastructures, efforts approaches for cataloguing, indexing and mapping knowledge taxonomies in order to organize the content of knowledge repositories, navigation tools to enable easy accessibility, knowledge repository scalability and extensibility, and building knowledge taxonomies that extend across various communities of practice. 

PLANET ERNST & YOUNG

Since 1997 PLANET ERNST & YOUNG is organised around two Strategic Business Units: 

 

	Management Consulting Services (MCS); and
	Development and Engineering Consulting Services (DECS).

PLANET ERNST & YOUNG's Management Consulting Services (MCS) integrate expertise in strategic visioning, business process management, information technology and organizational change for targetting clients' business growth and performance improvement problems. PLANET ERNST & YOUNG's MCS provides services in three axes: 

	strategy development;
	performance improvement; and
	solution delivery.

Strategy Development services provide a new perspective in order to formulate forward-thinking strategies for sustainable business growth and competitive positioning and span a wide array of strategic consultancy areas from: Sector Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Business Unit Strategy; Information Systems Strategy; etc. Performance Improvement services help increase staff productivity and generate organizational renewal; PLANET ERNST & YOUNG helps clients streamline supply-chains, reengineer and improve business processes, change organizational structures, define technical architectures and manage the deployment of information systems. Solution delivery services help client companis turn ideas into results and assists them install and operate specialised systems that range from large-scale IT systems (such as the SAP system) to specific functional systems (e.g. budgeting, salary grading, etc). 
PLANET ERNST & YOUNG's MCS has developed strong business relations with international players in the management consulting and information technology scene, like McKinsey & Company, the Monitor Company, Coopers & Lybrand International, SAP AG and SEMA Group Belgium. Since 1989 PLANET ERNST & YOUNG has established and operates an Office in Brussels, while the company operates offices in Romania and Moldova since 1994. In addition, the company has established two affiliate companies: PLANET ERNST & YOUNG Northern Greece S.A. (Salonica), and PLANET ERNST & YOUNG Western Greece S.A. (Patras). Since its creation, PLANET ERNST & YOUNG is undergoing a rapid and solid development in terms of turnover, exports, assets, human resources. The rate of increase of the company sales exceeds 60% each year, while sales for 1996 exceeded 5 million ECU. PLANET ERNST & YOUNG considers as its main asset the specialists it employs; the full-time staff consists of 85 people, mainly graduates in engineering and economics. 
PLANET ERNST & YOUNG has an extensive experience in EU-funded R&D projects. Examples of RTD projects that PLANET ERNST & YOUNG contributed include TRENDS, BROOM, AITIME, SPHERE, ASTRA, EPIC, GIPE II, TOBIAS, DIMPE, GEOTEL, DIDAMES, AGORA, IDMS, EUROFRET, METAFORA, EBR, DEDICATED, QUARTET, etc.

SEMA Group Belgium  

Sema Group Belgium is not only one of the leading European companies of consultancy, system integration and services in the field of Telecommunication and Information Technology in Europe: it is also an example of continous growth in the recent years in terms both of Turn-over and Profits and of a true European Group, significantly present in all the major European countries (18000 staff world-wide). Sema Group Belgium, over 250 staff, is one of the Belgian arms of the Group, specialising in complex Information Sistems design and implementation.
Sema Group Belgium has three linked business areas serving the major sectors of the economy: banking and finance, industry, space and defence, healthcare, energy, telecommunications, commerce and services, and the public sector.
Our core business is systems integration.  But our strength lies in the full range of services we can mobilise to meet our client's specific needs -strategic consultancy, systems development and integration, software products and outsourcing- coupled with a carefully considered approach to matching resources to requirements.
Through this network of integrated services, we can work with customers all the way : from defining a business or IT strategy, through supplying systems and products to implement that strategy, to on-going support and outsourcing.

Consultancy and systems integration:
Across Europe, and beyond, we have an unrivalled breadth of experience in developing IT strategies and in managing the changes associated with introducing new systems.

Systems Development and Integration:
Systems integration is at the heart of our business -and as one of Europe's major systems integrators, we pride ourselves on being at the forefront of technological developments.
The Group's technical software activities range from real-time process control for industry and software for embedded processors, to rail signalling systems : balancing the crucial demands of security, reliability and functionality for some of Europe's largest and most sophisticated clients.
Sema Group Belgium has been involved in facilities management and outsourcing for 20 years and we offer a wide and flexible range of services, from the management of a client's entire information system to a temporary service to support a customer moving from one system to another.  We also support specific applications, as well as providing back-up and disaster recovery facilities.  Sema Group Belgium offers these services either at the client's site or from our own European network of data centres (the Belgian player in this field is Sema Group Belgium Managed Services SA).
The Group is continuing to invest in and develop a number of tools and methodologies, particularly in the area of software engineering workbenches and common software platforms; software kernels developed from experience on major projects.
In particular, in the areas concerned by the DECOR technical environment, Sema Group Belgium masters different technological aspects:

	the Internet/Intranet technologies, taking advantage of existing products and specifically of Hyperwave, recently awarded with the Grand Prix at the 1997 "Esprit" week and particularly suited for Knowledge Management applications;
	the Workflow, where the Team-ware product line is supported by a methodology designed by Sema Group Belgium to deal with the complexity of the organisational concepts;
	the SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language) technology, based on a suite of products developed within Sema Group Belgium

Based on SGML, Sema Group Belgium has developed an application kernel called Sema Group Belgium Application Framework (SAF) which proved to be very effective in integrating complex Document-based Information Systems having heterogeneous sources and outputs of multiple format.

IKA  

The Social Security Institute is the largest and most important organization for social security in Greece. The institute's main activities are:

	granting insurance services (reimbursements, pensions, and other kinds)
	granting health services (medical and paramedical examinations, hospital treatment etc.)
	collecting insurance premiums for IKA and third parties