The project builds on a research and development consortium of BME, and an academic new media research institute within that organisation as knowledge centre, and La Frutta Elettronica Ltd, a multimedia and interface development company, as technology centre.

The aim of the project is to design a favourable technological and semantic environment for PhD students in which special research-interest groups and sub-communities can emerge and effectively function. The on-line portal is designed to support collaborative content publication and filtering through its advanced rating, ontological and feedback systems. The consortium is set out to accomplish the following goals through a common project:

Technical goals

To develop the prototype of an integrated on-line telecommunication infrastructure optimised to support the communication needs of emergent virtual communities and collaborative content filtering.

Scientific goals

To explore ontologies, thesauri and systems of classification that can be used to identify and measure similarities among users, groups and contents. To develop data-mining algorithms that effectively serve this goal. The comparative analysis of already existing methods for content rating, filtering and recommendation. The exploration of feedback mechanisms in on- and off-line communities. The comparative analysis of visual, textual and other forms of feedback.

Technical and scientific goals

(1)To develop an interface prototype that is harmonised characteristics of the Hungarian linguistic and sociocultural environment.

(2)To develop a system consisting of different levels of access and a transparent and effective rating for users and content.

(3)The development of a visualisation method and a software tool that helps to maximise the efficiency of data-feedback within the system.

Social goals

(1)To enable the academic researchers and institutes to cluster around common interests, research goals; support the developing groups' work, debate and co-operation, and thus promote a new collaborative model of knowledge production and management that reaches beyond institutional boundaries.

Economic goals

We expect the development of the following potential products through this project:

(1)An integrated communication media application for community communication, optimised for the web.

(2)The particular modules (engines) of the above application.