ICING Workpackages
ICING is planned as a thirty-month work programme, which is structured into 10 work packages. WP1 Consortium Management is a 'wrapper' activity that holds together all the others; WP9 Dissemination and Exploitation Planning, WP10 Evaluation and Self-Assessment) are generic or longitudinal work packages that run throughout the project. The remaining seven cover the specification, research, development and testing of the technology and experimental services.
WP1, Consortium Management. The main aim for WP1 is to manage the project to a successful completion of its objectives, within the agreed time schedule and budget, with results that meet the agreed high quality standards. It is led and mainly executed by DIT as Co-ordinating contractor, but also includes an element of participation of the Workpackage leaders to ensure proper co-ordination between the central Consortium Management and the management of each technical Workpackage.
WP2, Research into eCommunity and Usability of eGovernment Services is a longitudinal, basic research activity that last for the duration of the project. The overall aim of this Work Package is to research social and human factors and apply a human-centred approach to the project, so that the ICING services can be designed to meet user needs with a User Centred Design approach, which integrates user requirements into early stages of the technology development cycle. User expectations will be translated into innovative interfaces that will allow the user to interact easily with the technology in wherever environments they are. The workpackage will implement a series of actions grouped into three main Tasks.
WP3 Functional Requirements and Service Scenarios for Intelligent Environments. An increasingly complex network environment, multiple access modes and a proliferation of service contexts make the determination of a common set of functional requirements across the ICING cities a difficult and challenging task. The geographical, social and administrative differences in the city cases require a tightly defined set of service scenarios. In the ICING methodology this is achieved by a rapid knowledge discovery effort, involving city administrations and technology partners alike. The knowledge discovery process will inform a set of use cases for each of the city sites.
WP4 Research and Development of access modes, participatory information spaces and interfaces. This Workpackage will explore the service and interaction potential as envisaged from an 'urban ecology' perspective of the thin-skinned City concept, by exploring what is needed to combine the various available technologies for ambient intelligences into a set of usable tools that can be integrated with the city services and infrastructure to deliver the kinds of service we require. While the ambient intelligent technologies are expected to open up new interaction pathways between citizens, city processes, the environment and the urban infrastructure, to make any of this happen we will need a better understanding of the components and of the new interactive spaces as created by the new heavily boosted situation.
WP5 Citizen-Driven Interaction with the City. This Workpackage is meant to create interfaces, mediating tools and social processes between the city, the citizens and other stakeholders, between official and expert knowledge of urban infrastructure and the knowledge that is based on lived experience of the city. We have chosen to call this concept the Urban Mediator.
WP6 Spatial based decision support and environmental interaction. Activating the environment with sensor-based intelligence (including the citizen's mobile devices) will dramatically increase the volume of geospatial data that is available. The broad goals for this work package are to improve the geospatial technologies to underpin eGovernment services and decision-support tools.
WP7 Infrastructure modification and system integration. This Workpackage is established to develop a platform that will gather a range of city-data from the city administrations' systems or from other 3rd party services / organizations. The paltform will process this information and develop a set of actions that derive from that information. Some of these actions may be automated or may be undertaken by city staff. The rules deciding the choice of action will be predefined. The WP7 platform will also be able to respond to the citizen, seamlessly, through a variety of channels.
WP8 Test-bed set-up, adjustment, trials and testing. This work package is designed to run in two phases. In the first twelve months of the project, it will set up and test the enabling mobile sensor networks needed to create the 'City Laboratories' for designing, testing and evaluating experimental services in ICING to provide a proof of concept of the "thin skinned city" and its technological model. For the remainder of the project, it will ensure that the test-beds remain operational to support service development and evaluation.
WP9 Dissemination and Exploitation Planning. This work package covers all the tasks of making IICING and its work known, managing IPR, contributing to standards and planning for the exploitation of results in a variety of ways.
An Exploitation Group will be set up involving each industrial partner, contacts of research partners and people responsible for service provision in Public Administrations partners. This group will prepare the Roadmap for future RTD, the Implementation and Use plan and the Final Exploitation and Use of Knowledge Plan for the whole project, and for the different components or individual results. The group will also be responsible for monitoring developments outside of the project which will impact on their exploitation plans (e.g. market data, state of the art developments).
WP10 Self-Assessment and Evaluation. Evaluation and self-assessment in ICING have two different aspects: the formal technical & usability evaluation of the prototypes systems and services, and a self-assessment process that monitors how the project achieves its stated objectives.
The following diagram is a graphic representation of how the workpackages interrealate, one to another
