ESIS Portuguese Awards

The Second Edition of the ESIS Portuguese Awards

The winners of the ESIS Portuguese awards have been announced during the conference presenting the Information Society Day Europe'99 which was held in Lisbon on 15th September 1998, during the World Expo'98.

These awards have been established, for the second year edition, by the ESIS Portuguese contractor, Silicon Company in cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology Cabinet for the IS - Missão para a Sociedade de Informação and the newspaper Expresso.

The initiative raised a lot of attention in the relevant sectors and 64 projects were candidates.

A work of art has been especially created by a Portuguese artist to capture the spirit of the Information Society.

The organisation

The candidatures were made through the answers to a questionnaire form. There was no limit for the number of projects candidates of each organisation as long as the projects were different and were in accordance with the requirements stated by ISPO for a project in the framework of the Information Society.

The prizes were intended to reward:

The most innovative project (Prize EXPRESSO)
The project with bigger impact on IS development (Prize MISSÃO)
The best project presentation (Prize SILICON)

The analysis and selection of the projects submitted for the competition was made by a jury of 5 key representatives of the business and academic environment in the framework of the Information Society and were appointed by the 3 local partners involved in this process(Competition rules - in Portuguese)

The three 1998 winners

The following projects received the above mentioned prizes:

Prize MISSÃO

Project CALYPSO

The Calypso project is aimed at developing a ticketing system devoted to transports and other kind of usage in a region in general, i.e. the access control, commercial operation payment (using contactless technologies).
The scope of the possible applications is almost unlimited, being foreseen at France level, to make a wide range of possible operations by MULTIBANCO card type.
"In Portugal, we are developing an unique support which enables transport tickets' loading to be made through the common ATM and afterwards it can be used for making payment by contact at electronic pocket level and contactless for transports, tools, parking, etc.".
The main targets of this project are the following:

To develop an unique support for all kinds of payment at city level, thereby interconnecting the current systems by contactless telematics technology;
To facilitate the selling system of the concerned transport operators;
To be aware of travel matrix at region level;
To allow various transport operators to be paid effectively according to real use costs.

presented by OTLIS (Operadores de Transporte de Lisboa), SIBS and INESC

Prize EXPRESSO

Project GEIRA

presented by the Universities of Minho, Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

The GEIRA is a project of development of multimedia information services concerned with Portuguese heritage in North of Portugal.Two major guidelines have motivated the GEIRA project as a disseminating system of information supported on Internet: the information society and the cultural, economic and social reality of the Euro-region North of Portugal-Galicia.
The main forms of action are the following:

To disseminate the scientific and technological potentialities of the region, specifically at Higher Education Institutions level;
To value the cultural heritage, specially in the fields of the bibliography, archives, museums and archaeology;
To stimulate the environmental protection and preservation by disseminating the geologic and biologic features of natural systems of the region.

In order to ensure the adequate levels of quality related to the project achievement, this has been divided into several thematic intervention areas - according to the operation objectives and needs - and into central service nuclei. Several researchers and experts have been invited to co-ordinate the technical teams and the materials towards the development and updated rendering of services. The objective of each one of the thematic intervention areas is to feature and make sure that an information system adjusted to each form of action is real, following their integration in equivalent systems in Galicia. The intervention areas are the following: Science and Technology, Archaeology, Archives, Libraries, Museums and Nature. Besides these objectives of sectorial nature - "vertical" objectives - the GEIRA activities are interlinked to other areas of national interest - "horizontal" objectives - such as: Education, Society, Insertion in Local Community.

Prize SILICON

Project OUEA

presented by Eixo Atlântico do Noroeste Penínsular

The OUEA project (Observatório Urbano de Eixo Atlântico) was created from the existing cooperation among the 18 main cities of Euro-region Galicia - North of Portugal in order to systematize the access and the current information interchange as well as to facilitate its best use both by the citizens and private, public, social and economic agents. The main objective is to implement the competition among those Euro-region cities and improve the potentialities of the region, creating new jobs by development and applying the new opportunities given by Information Society. In this sense, AAUO arose as a wide database integrated by the two above mentioned information types and their consequent applications: Citizen Information System and the Socio-Economic Observatory. The Key targets of the project are the following:

To implement a permanent system for collecting and disseminating the qualitative and quantitative data concerning the several municipalities whose object is to contribute to a better knowledge both of Galicia and North of Portugal socio-economic realities;
To stimulate the use and integration of existing technologies as well as to implement the telematic applications near local administration in order to facilitate the municipality service access to citizen;
To promote the citizen access to a wide database being common to the 18 municipalities;
To contribute to the homogeneity and cohesion of the Euro-region and support the regional development policies;
To facilitate the transfer technology operations;
To contribute to the policies supporting the new jobs creation;
To facilitate the associative system among the enterpreneurs of the two Euro-region sides.

Three Honourable mentions

Due to the high quality of the projects presented for competition, the jury decided to attribute honourable mentions to the following projects:

	Prize Missão Project RAIAR presented by JAE and DGTT		Prize Expresso Project AROMA presented by Portugal Telecom and INESC		Prize SILICON Project PCTS presented by the Parents Association for the Education of Deaf Children.
The RAIAR system (Rede de Accesso a Informaçao de ambito rodoviario) consists in implementing and exploiting a telematics network with remote access to information within the roadway scope, so as to allow that the several entities participating in the sector can access, mutually through efficient way and nonredundancy, to information needed to fulfill their attributions, concerning the three parties Road, Vehicle and Driver. From the nuclear point of view, this system is a technological infrastructure which establishes the connection among the information systems from several organisations, adopting as prevailing norm the information exchange and sharing. Due to its positioning in the information technologies application field and perspectives to be open up within the roadway scope, the RAIAR system meets the current needs, either at national or international level, since it contributes: to a more simplified and joint institutional relationship; to the promotion, at information infrastructure level, of a integrated national plan on roadway security; to the availability, in real time, related to statistics and others management indicators, support to planning functions, evaluation and coordination; to issue, update and validate registers, licenses and other documents concerning vehicles, drivers, carriers and other professionals of sector; To create national interoperability conditions which make a future insertion in transeuropean networks of roadway information feasible.		The AROMA project is aimed at testing and demonstrating (and developing) software tools as regards the resource intelligent management (i.e. dynamic) in a multilayer network - IP, ATM and HFC. The demonstration platform which belongs to a previous project - ATHOC - will work as a testing network of the programs and tools to be developed. Internet/ATM technological convergence on hybrid fiber/coaxial (HFC) access network. To make support application demonstrations related to the Quality of Service (QoS) in ATM/HFC networks.		The new information technologies contribute to extend the communication potentialities of auditive handicapped children, to diversify their socio-cultural networks and increase considerably the access to information.The Technological Communication Project for Deaf (TCPD) is intended to make available the above mentioned technologies and promote their usage near the children, their families and the technicians with whom they work. The APECDAP, as the proponent entity of project, coordinates its development and application near the partner institutions, which are: the Deaf Association in Porto, the EB 2/3 Paranhos School and the EB 2/3 Nicolau Nasoni School. The information technologies covered by this project are the multimedia computers, digital photographic camera, text telephones, pagers, educational/recreation CDs and Internet. In parallel, other actions are being developed, such as training courses, research works, seminar organisation and other meetings, elaboration of an Electronic Dictionary on Portuguese Gesture Language, the Communicare Magazine’s edition, organisation of a club for young people and several other activities. The population covered by TCPD includes the children/young people who attend the partner institutions, their technicians and relatives. The project will last for a period of three years, having succeeded in the results achieved during the first year. To overcome the communication barriers by diversifying the socio-cultural networks of children and families involved in the project; To allow the access to information; To render familiar the deaf children and young people with the new information technologies; To test new learning techniques; To develop linguistic competencies related to Written Portuguese Language and Portuguese Gesture Language; To research the development of these capabilities; To disseminate and promote the technological communication.

Promoting the ISPO Conference with a chip card Following ISPO’s directions to promote the Conference in an attractive and lively way, SILICON took the initiative to issue a special chip card, the SILi-card, to be forwarded to the Conference attendees. This chip card had a lay-out especially designed for the announcement of the European Information Society Day ’99, where the logo of ISPO, EXPO’98 and ICEP, the Portuguese Governmental Institute for Investments, Commerce and Tourism were included. ICEP was an enthusiastic partner in this initiative, as the SILi-card constituted an outstanding promotion mean of ICEP’s new web site "Portugal Insite" (http://www.portugal-insite.pt). 6 PCs were installed in the Conference lobby at the EU Pavillion at EXPO’ 98, allowing the attendees to access, for instance, the ISPO Web site, the ICEP’s Portugal Insite’s web or his personal mail box, during event breaks.