With offices in the UK, Germany, Japan and the USA, the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) develops and provides world-leading software to solve complex mathematical problems. It is the lead partner of the MONET consortium which includes Stilo Technology Ltd of Bristol, the Universities of Bath, Manchester, Eindhoven and Western Ontario, and the I3S Laboratory in Nice.

The aim of the EU-funded MONET project is to develop an infrastructure to deploy mathematical ‘services’ - remote autonomous servers which can solve mathematical problems – on the next generation of the internet.   Such services need to be able to advertise what kinds of problems they can solve so that they can be discovered and used by human beings or by pieces of software equally easily.

The Worldwide Web is a vast, sprawling collection of hyperlinks. This is fine for human surfers who are able to filter out excess noise and understand natural languages, but it’s of no use when machines need to process and understand information. “The semantic web” is an evolution of the existing web where information is encoded using well-defined vocabularies (often known as ontologies) which are designed to make the meaning of data explicit and unambiguous.   The MONET project is developing ontologies to allow a mathematical web service to describe precisely what it does so that it can be discovered and invoked by another program running anywhere in the world without any human intervention.

The ultimate aim is to provide better tools for engineers and scientists who increasingly need access to sophisticated mathematical algorithms to tackle problems such as preventing climate change, finding cures for diseases like cancer and AIDS, building safer and more efficient aircraft etc. The MONET framework will help guide such users, who typically are not mathematicians, towards the most appropriate and specialised algorithms for solving their problem, running on the most appropriate hardware platforms.

Dr. Mike Dewar, Senior Technical Consultant at NAG Ltd and the Coordinator of the MONET project comments, “This new approach to building applications is hugely exciting but to be successful is has to be built on agreed standards. EU funding has helped us to build a community which is adding a European dimension to appropriate international standardisation activities in the Worldwide Web Consortium and elsewhere.”

Peter Walters, UK National Contact Point for the EU’s IST Programme within Framework, acknowledges the benefits that EU funding can bring to this sort of research: ‘Without support from the EU’s Fifth Framework programme this project may only have gone ahead in a far longer timescale. Bringing together expertise from a number of countries – including the UK - should much improve the chances of a successful conclusion.’

Peter also says, ‘The new, Sixth, Framework Programme (FP6), was launched in Brussels last month and makes available another €3.6b to support innovative and collaborative R&D projects in the IST area. The first Call for proposals in the IST area was published on 17 December and organisations have until 24 April 2003 to put their proposals together and submit them to the Commission. The budget for this Call is more than 25% of the total available for IST over the four year lifetime of FP6, so this is clearly an important time for people in the IST community who want to apply for support from the Framework budget.’

‘The easiest way to access information on IST in FP6 is through the DTI’s support website http://www.ukishelp.co.uk and I would urge everyone with an interest in IST to log on and register with the site. UKISHELP also provides a telephone helpline for IST enquiries on 0870 606 1515.’