Many software engineering and cloud computing are developed in open source in order to implicitly avoid the curse of the European science paradox -- we are good at science but poor at exploitation – but fail because they lack adequate support and strategy. Open source provides an efficient framework for cooperation and IP management and that makes it indeed a powerful enabler for collaborative innovation. It is wrong however to assume that making the source available automatically attracts contributors and grants immediate market access. Open source as a convenient process is not the same as open source as a business strategy. The aim of this project is to support the market outreach strategies of EU-supported open source by launching AppHub, the European open source market place. AppHub is a service platform that will help the market to seamlessly identify, position and implement the software outcomes of these projects. The partners that will develop, run and promote AppHub over this two-year project and beyond combine unparalleled expertise in open source community management, EU research projects and a breakthrough technology in software asset management.

European research projects are expected to deliver results for reuse by other research projects and integration by business users. In both cases, to increase the chance of a tangible impact, research projects must deliver results that are well packaged, easy to understand and easy to use. ReachOut addresses this need with a two-prong solution. First, by educating research projects on the methodology and benefits of beta testing and, second, by providing a platform with tools and functional resources to launch beta testing campaigns, recruit beta testers and collect feedback. The ReachOut concept is summarized as follows: If a project is able to launch a beta-testing campaign of its results, it has what it takes to bring value to the market, engage with other research projects, users, partners and contributors and develop its own ecosystem. By encouraging partners to work together to enhance the market maturity of the product of their research, a beta testing campaign is a best practice to deliver valuable and exploitable results. A beta testing campaign is a technico-marketing initiative in which, on one hand, provisional software is combined with product attributes such as proper packaging, user interface and documentation so as to make it understandable and easy to use and, on the other, beta testers are recruited and incentivised to provide feedback with the possibility of winning a prize. Unlike conventional, usually project-centric support actions, ReachOut is market-oriented. Its aim is to generate actual connections between research projects, third-party research projects and real-life market users. ReachOut project partners demonstrate solid expertise stemming from their day-to-day business activities and dissemination and support experience gained from a dozen EU-funded projects, including successfully delivering the Ocean Directory of cloud projects, the AppHub marketplace for open source projects and the CHOReVOLUTION beta testing campaign.

Since the inception of the internet, applications and services using the internet have evolved significantly. In addition the number of devices connected to the internet, the creation of vast data lakes as well as distributed data cooperatives has made searching and discovering data and generally resources a difficult, yet very important field of research, development and innovation. Today it is even more important to be able to find, represent and ultimately make sense of internet based data sources and resources without the need of relying on non-transparent organisations offering such services, potentially violating privacy and trust. The vision of the NGI Search project is to change the way we use and experience search & discover data and resources in general on the internet and web. This includes new user interfaces for searching and representing data (e.g. voice and image based), heterogeneous data sources (e.g. IoT, semantic data, multimedia, social media as well as traditional websites), new methodologies (e.g. machine learning and natural language processing) in generic context and specific use cases (e.g. industry 4.0, health, social media).

Software is everywhere and the productivity of Software Engineers has increased radically with the advent of new specification, design and programming paradigms and languages. The main objective of the project DECODER is to introduce radical solutions to increase productivity and by means of new languages that improve the situation by abstractions of the formalisms used today for requirements analysis and specification. We will develop a methodology and tools to improve the productivity of the software development process for medium-criticality applications in the domains of IoT, Cloud Computing, and Operating Systems by combining Natural Language Processing techniques, Modelling techniques and Formal Methods. The combination is a novel approach that permits a smooth transition from informal requirements engineering to deployment and maintenance phases. A radical improvement is expected from the management and transformation of informal data into material (herein called ‘knowledge’) that can be assimilated by any party involved in a development process. Thus, the DECODER project will 1) introduce new languages to represent knowledge in a more abstract manner, 2) develop transformations leading from informal material into specifications and code and vice-versa, 3) define and prototype a Persistent Knowledge Monitor for managing all relevant knowledge, and 4) develop a prototype IDE. The project will automate the transformation steps using existing techniques from the Big Data (knowledge extraction), Model-Driven Engineering (knowledge representation and refinement), and Formal Methods (specifications and proofs). The project will produce a novel Framework combining these techniques and demonstrate its efficiency on several uses cases belonging to the beforehand mentioned domains. The project expects an average benefit of 20% in terms of efforts on these use-cases and will provide recommendations on how to generalise the approach to other medium-criticality domains.