eilf/index.php - www.eclipse.org/proposals - Git at Google

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     <div id="maincontent">
 	<div id="midcolumn">

 <h1>The EILF Project</h1>
 </p>
 <?php
 include_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/projects/fragments/proposal-page-header.php");
 generate_header("SMILA (EILF)");
 ?>
 <h3> Please note: at the Creation Review, the project name
 will be changed to SMILA (The SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture).</h3>

 <h2>Introduction</h2>

 <p>The EILF project is a proposed open source
 project under the Eclipse Technology Project.</p>


 <p>According to the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/">Eclipse Development Process</a>, this
 proposal is intended to declare the intent and scope of the EILF project as well as to gather input from the Eclipse community.
 You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the
 <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.eilf">http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.eilf</a> newsgroup.</p>

 <h2>Background</h2>

 <p>Enterprise information systems have
 mainly focused on structured information residing in databases, ERP systems,
 etc. Now, however, the management of unstructured information is receiving more and more
 attention in the market. The term Information Access Management (IAM) has been
 coined as a name for a more general approach that bridges the two worlds.</p>


 <p>Some vendors address the need for IAM tools
 with proprietary approaches mainly originating in their domestic market, such
 as search engine technology. In addition, some attempts have been undertaken to
 address specific parts of IAM even in the open source community (cf. UIMA).</p>


 <p>However, a standardized architecture
 covering all parts of the IAM process on an enterprise level is still missing. This
 includes the standardization of the overall architecture and frequently
 used building blocks as well as a methodology for implementing IAM systems.</p>

 <p>Having many years of project and product
 development experience in information logistics, search and related IAM
 applications, empolis GmbH and brox IT-Solutions GmbH decided to join forces
 and are now seeking more interested parties, e.g. Eclipse members, to launch
 the <b><i>Enterprise Information Logistics Framework</i></b> (EILF) project
 addressing the above mentioned aspects.</p>

 <h2>Description</h2>

 <p>The EILF project will deliver the foundation
 for building IAM systems ranging from medium-sized to enterprise-level
 installations. For doing so, EILF will define and implement a standard
 architecture making intensive use of the OSGi model to support componentization
 and extensibility.</p>

 <p>Mainly focusing on the server-side
 architecture, EILF will provide a platform enabling all relevant steps in IAM,
 including management of data sources, data access, pre-processing of
 (structured and mainly unstructured) data, linguistic analysis, indexing,
 search and so on. </p>


 <p><img border=0
 	      width=604
 	      height=453
 	      src="architecture-overview.jpg"></p>

 <p><b>Figure 1</b>: Architecture Overview of EILF</p>

 <p>Components from existing Eclipse projects
 will be adapted and integrated in the EILF platform in order to implement specific
 steps in usual IAM processes. Furthermore, EILF will deliver new components as
 they are needed for the targeted IAM processes.</p>


 <p>As an example, the EILF platform will allow
 for the implementation of an enterprise information system by</p>

 <ul>
  <li>collecting documents from a variety of
      (external and internal) data sources</li>
  <li>pre-processing this data</li>
  <li>enriching it with semantic metadata </li>
  <li>indexing data and metadata</li>
  <li>making all information accessible either
      via an integrated search platform or via direct access through web
      services</li>
 </ul>


 <p><img border=0
 	      width=604
 	      height=434
 	      src="architecture-service-model.jpg"></p>

 <p><b>Figure 2</b>: Architecture Overview - Service Model of EILF</p>


 <p>To summarize, EILF will deliver a platform
 as well as dedicated components for the implementation of a next generation IAM
 and information logistics purposes.</p>

 <p>Thus, EILF will allow enterprise
 organizations to use latest information access/management technology in their
 business processes.</p>

 <h2>Scope</h2>

 <p>The EILF project will address a set of
 features and components that are required for the implementation of typical
 information logistic platforms. Some of the most important aspects will be
 described briefly in the following.</p>

 <h3>Standardized and Scalable Architecture</h3>

 <p>EILF will deliver a highly scalable
 architecture for IAM processes based on well-established standards. The
 objective is to serve a wide range of application scenarios from medium-sized
 simple search environments to enterprise-level business information systems. Scalability
 will be achieved by an appropriate design which ensures that additional
 resources (e.g. hardware) can easily be added to a running system in order to
 achieve a higher throughput of data etc. The underlying infrastructure will
 probably rely on messaging systems and queuing for use cases aiming at high
 throughput of data while other approaches need to be provided for synchronous
 processes.</p>

 <h3>Componentization</h3>

 <p>A major focus of EILF will be on
 componentization of the overall system architecture, thus ensuring that other
 open source tools, products by different vendors, or even project-specific extensions
 can easily be plugged into the system. Componentization will make use of OSGi
 while the various OSGi services need to be orchestrated by an appropriate and
 user-friendly mechanism that still needs to be identified. </p>

 <p>In addition, we believe that the
 configuration and orchestration of the appropriate components should not only
 be possible by highly technical people actually <i>programming</i> new
 workflows but rather this should be configurable by an experienced and
 trained user. Standards, such as BPEL appear to be promising candidates for
 this  in particular when appropriate tools become available.</p>

 <h3>Data Source Management</h3>

 <p>For any IAM platform, access to a variety
 of data sources is essential. Some of these data sources can be considered
 fairly standardized (e.g. when crawling Web resources) while others are highly
 proprietary. While EILF cannot deliver ready-to-use solutions for all such data
 sources, the objective is to make available a set of standardized connectors
 (crawlers) for the most relevant data sources  but also to provide a framework
 by means of which connectors to other data sources can easily be integrated.</p>

 <h3>Operating and Management</h3>

 <p>Operation, management and monitoring of the
 IAM solution are particularly relevant for enterprise-level systems. EILF will
 address that requirement by providing tools and approaches by means of which
 the current state of any EILF-based system can be monitored in terms of a general
 health check of the entire application as well as the single components. In
 addition, this shall allow verifying utilized hardware resources in order to
 foresee upcoming problems and bottlenecks. Standards, such as SNMP, will be
 addressed here.</p>

 <p>Additionally, enhancing the management
 capabilities of IAM technology in the area of backup management is on focus.
 One of the major aspects for a next generation IAM technology will be the
 ability to integrate in backup and maintenance procedures of enterprise
 companies. This fact will be more and more important, because the amount of
 required computing will increase depending on the increased usage of semantic
 technologies in the future.</p>

 <h3>Authentication and Authorization</h3>

 <p>Just as any other enterprise application,
 IAM systems as well require Authentication and Authorization be handled in a
 careful manner. This includes access rights with regards to information
 available in the system, permissions to (not) execute certain operations, but
 also user profiles which may potentially drive processes in the IAM system.
 Also, functional aspects such as single-sign-on (SSO) are very important.</p>

 <h3>Reporting</h3>

 <p>Analytics and Business Intelligence
 Reporting are essential parts to any IAM system as the information provided in
 such reports not only allows to optimize the usage of the system but also to
 identify missing information via knowledge gap analysis and similar approaches.
 </p>

 <p>The powerful reporting engine provided by
 Eclipse BIRT will very likely be utilized with EILF even though this aspect may
 be shifted to later releases of the project.</p>

 <h2>Out of Scope</h2>

 <p>As of today, the EILF project does not focus
 on the client (user interface) part of IAM systems. This limitation includes
 the integration into existing enterprise portals or other user interface
 approaches. Sample clients might potentially be provided but probably mainly
 for demonstration purposes.</p>

 <p>Also, the implementation of specific
 aspects of IAM (such as e.g. leading edge linguistic technology or ontology
 management components) is out of scope although the integration of such
 components in the EILF platform should be straightforward.</p>

 <p>In terms of completeness, EILF will provide
 basic working components while commercial vendors may offer more advanced
 implementations of those components, for example relating to scalability or
 feature sets.</p>

 <p>All of the above are subject to change
 should the need arise to more tightly integrate one or more of these aspects
 with the current scope of EILF.</p>

 <h2>Organization</h2>

 <h3>Mentors</h3>
 <ul>
 <li>Wayne Beaton, Eclipse Foundation</li>
 <li>Markus Knauer, Innoopract</li>
 </ul>

 <h3>Initial Committers</h3>

 <p>The initial committers will ensure the
 setup of the EILF platform as well as the initial implementation of both the
 platform and selected components. The agile development process will follow
 the Eclipse Development Process standards for openness and transparency. Hence, we will actively
 encourage contributions to EILF.</p>

 <p>The initial committers and contributors are:</p>

 <ul>
  <li>Georg Schmidt (brox IT-Solutions GmbH): architect,
      project lead and committer</li>
  <li>Igor Novakovic (empolis GmbH): team lead,
      committer</li>
  <li>Jürgen Schumacher (empolis GmbH):
      architect, committer</li>
  <li>Daniel Stucky (empolis GmbH): architect, contributor</li>
  <li>Sebastian Voigt (brox IT-Solutions GmbH):
      senior developer, committer</li>
  <li>Ralf Rausch (brox IT-Solutions GmbH): developer,
      contributor</li>
  <li>Ralf Schumann (brox IT-Solutions GmbH):
      developer, contributor</li>
  <li>Thomas Menzel (brox IT-Solutions GmbH):
      architect, committer</li>
 </ul>

 <h3>Code Contribution</h3>

 <p>empolis GmbH as well as brox IT-Solutions
 GmbH offer initial code contributions for some of the components based on their
 experience and long-standing development expertise in the information logistics
 area.</p>

 <h3>Interested Parties</h3>

 <p>Both empolis GmbH as well as brox
 IT-Solutions GmbH express their explicit interest in the project as also
 indicated by the list of committers and contributors above.</p>

 <p>Furthermore, Arexera Information
 Technologies GmbH (represented by their CTO, Bidjan Tschaitschian) as well as
 project partners on behalf of Siemens and SAP expressed their interest in the
 EILF project. </p>

 <p>More generally, universities and research
 centers are interested in using a standardized framework for search
 technologies to use it as a foundation for further research. The project fits
 also the interests of the Fraunhofer institutes as well as the DFKI (German Institute
 for Artificial Intelligence) because of its integration in processing chains of
 research projects. </p>

 <p>Moreover, EILF will be highly interesting
 for commercial software when it comes to integrating specific components and
 building blocks into a fully operational environment without having to care
 about the entire infrastructure from scratch. The cooperation between brox IT-Solutions
 GmbH and empolis GmbH is already a very good example of that: while the primary
 focus of brox technology is on accessibility and management of (unstructured)
 data, the key benefit of empolis technology is on indexing and semantic
 refinement of that data  in a productive environment, however, both aspects
 need to be addressed simultaneously.</p>

 <p>Last but not least one of the main focuses
 of standardization departments of enterprise companies will be on
 standardization of building blocks in their companies. The EILF project is the
 first approach to deliver such a standardized approach for IAM technology.
 Therefore, also enterprise companies have a major interest on the outcome of
 the EILF project.</p>

 <h3>Relationships to other Eclipse projects </h3>

 <p>The following projects currently hosted by
 Eclipse might potentially become relevant in the course of EILF (in
 alphabetical order):</p>


 <ul>
  <li><b>BIRT</b> (<a
      href="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/">http://www.eclipse.org/birt/</a>)
      provides reporting features potentially relevant for the collection of information
      about usage of EILF components.</li>
  <li><b>BPEL</b> (<a
      href="http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/">http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/</a>) very
      likely will be used to orchestrate services as part of EILF.</li>
  <li><b>Corona</b> (<a
      href="http://www.eclipse.org/corona/">http://www.eclipse.org/corona/</a>)
      could potentially serve as a server-side runtime environment for EILF
      services.</li>
  <li><b>Connectivity</b> (<a
      href="http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/project_connectivity/">http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/project_connectivity/</a>)
      could deliver functionality for gathering content from diverse data
      sources.</li>
  <li><b>EclipseLink</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/">http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/</a>)
      can potentially provide components for the persistence of data inside EILF.</li>
  <li><b>Equinox</b> (<a
      href="http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/">http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/</a>)
      definitely will be utilized in order to implement componentization based
      on OSGi.</li>
  <li><b>Higgins</b> (<a
      href="http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/">http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/</a>)
      addresses identity management which will become relevant for EILF sooner
      or later.</li>
  <li><b>Target Management</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/">http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/</a>)
      could potentially be utilized for the administration and monitoring of an EILF
      installation that is deployed to distributed servers.</li>
  <li><b>Rich Ajax Platform</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/rap/">http://www.eclipse.org/rap/</a>)
      addresses more the client part but nevertheless can become relevant for
      the implementation of EILF clients.</li>
  <li><b>SOA Tools</b>
      (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/">http://www.eclipse.org/stp/</a>) as
      well as <b>Swordfish</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/">http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/</a>)
      both appear to be relevant when it comes to the service architecture of EILF.</li>
  <li><b>TPTP</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/">http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/</a>) very
  	   likely will be used for performance measurements and monitoring purposes.</li>
 </ul>


 <h3>User Community</h3>

 <p>EILF aims at delivering a de facto standard
 in the IAM area. Consequently, an active community providing solid feedback is
 essential. This includes a community of developers active in different areas
 (architecture, IAM components, UIs) as well as potential users of EILF who
 implement specific IAM systems.</p>

 <h3>Tentative Plan</h3>

 <h4>2008-03 Version 0.5</h4>

 <ul>
  <li>Basic architecture settled and
      implemented</li>
  <li>Simple search application available at
      least on demonstrator level</li>
 </ul>

 <h4>2008-06 Version 0.6</h4>

 <ul>
  <li>More components available e.g. supporting
      the integration of linguistic preprocessing</li>
  <li>More data sources accessible</li>
 </ul>

 <h4>2008-10 Version 1.0  Release 1.0</h4>

 <ul>
  <li>Orchestration of components / services </li>
  <li>Sample application</li>
  <li>Documentation and related material</li>
  <li>Full support of the OSGI architecture
      model</li>
 </ul>

 <h4>2009-03 Version 1.5</h4>

 <ul>
  <li>Improved support of Semantic Web
      features, ontologies etc.</li>
 </ul>
       </div>
   </div>
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	<h1>The EILF Project</h1>
	</p>
	<?php
	include_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/projects/fragments/proposal-page-header.php");
	generate_header("SMILA (EILF)");
	?>
	<h3> Please note: at the Creation Review, the project name
	will be changed to SMILA (The SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture).</h3>

	<h2>Introduction</h2>

	<p>The EILF project is a proposed open source
	project under the Eclipse Technology Project.</p>


	<p>According to the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/">Eclipse Development Process</a>, this
	proposal is intended to declare the intent and scope of the EILF project as well as to gather input from the Eclipse community.
	You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the
	<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.eilf">http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.eilf</a> newsgroup.</p>

	<h2>Background</h2>

	<p>Enterprise information systems have
	mainly focused on structured information residing in databases, ERP systems,
	etc. Now, however, the management of unstructured information is receiving more and more
	attention in the market. The term Information Access Management (IAM) has been
	coined as a name for a more general approach that bridges the two worlds.</p>


	<p>Some vendors address the need for IAM tools
	with proprietary approaches mainly originating in their domestic market, such
	as search engine technology. In addition, some attempts have been undertaken to
	address specific parts of IAM even in the open source community (cf. UIMA).</p>


	<p>However, a standardized architecture
	covering all parts of the IAM process on an enterprise level is still missing. This
	includes the standardization of the overall architecture and frequently
	used building blocks as well as a methodology for implementing IAM systems.</p>

	<p>Having many years of project and product
	development experience in information logistics, search and related IAM
	applications, empolis GmbH and brox IT-Solutions GmbH decided to join forces
	and are now seeking more interested parties, e.g. Eclipse members, to launch
	the <b><i>Enterprise Information Logistics Framework</i></b> (EILF) project
	addressing the above mentioned aspects.</p>

	<h2>Description</h2>

	<p>The EILF project will deliver the foundation
	for building IAM systems ranging from medium-sized to enterprise-level
	installations. For doing so, EILF will define and implement a standard
	architecture making intensive use of the OSGi model to support componentization
	and extensibility.</p>

	<p>Mainly focusing on the server-side
	architecture, EILF will provide a platform enabling all relevant steps in IAM,
	including management of data sources, data access, pre-processing of
	(structured and mainly unstructured) data, linguistic analysis, indexing,
	search and so on. </p>


	<p><img border=0
	width=604
	height=453
	src="architecture-overview.jpg"></p>

	<p><b>Figure 1</b>: Architecture Overview of EILF</p>

	<p>Components from existing Eclipse projects
	will be adapted and integrated in the EILF platform in order to implement specific
	steps in usual IAM processes. Furthermore, EILF will deliver new components as
	they are needed for the targeted IAM processes.</p>


	<p>As an example, the EILF platform will allow
	for the implementation of an enterprise information system by</p>

	<ul>
	<li>collecting documents from a variety of
	(external and internal) data sources</li>
	<li>pre-processing this data</li>
	<li>enriching it with semantic metadata </li>
	<li>indexing data and metadata</li>
	<li>making all information accessible either
	via an integrated search platform or via direct access through web
	services</li>
	</ul>


	<p><img border=0
	width=604
	height=434
	src="architecture-service-model.jpg"></p>

	<p><b>Figure 2</b>: Architecture Overview - Service Model of EILF</p>


	<p>To summarize, EILF will deliver a platform
	as well as dedicated components for the implementation of a next generation IAM
	and information logistics purposes.</p>

	<p>Thus, EILF will allow enterprise
	organizations to use latest information access/management technology in their
	business processes.</p>

	<h2>Scope</h2>

	<p>The EILF project will address a set of
	features and components that are required for the implementation of typical
	information logistic platforms. Some of the most important aspects will be
	described briefly in the following.</p>

	<h3>Standardized and Scalable Architecture</h3>

	<p>EILF will deliver a highly scalable
	architecture for IAM processes based on well-established standards. The
	objective is to serve a wide range of application scenarios from medium-sized
	simple search environments to enterprise-level business information systems. Scalability
	will be achieved by an appropriate design which ensures that additional
	resources (e.g. hardware) can easily be added to a running system in order to
	achieve a higher throughput of data etc. The underlying infrastructure will
	probably rely on messaging systems and queuing for use cases aiming at high
	throughput of data while other approaches need to be provided for synchronous
	processes.</p>

	<h3>Componentization</h3>

	<p>A major focus of EILF will be on
	componentization of the overall system architecture, thus ensuring that other
	open source tools, products by different vendors, or even project-specific extensions
	can easily be plugged into the system. Componentization will make use of OSGi
	while the various OSGi services need to be orchestrated by an appropriate and
	user-friendly mechanism that still needs to be identified. </p>

	<p>In addition, we believe that the
	configuration and orchestration of the appropriate components should not only
	be possible by highly technical people actually <i>programming</i> new
	workflows but rather this should be configurable by an experienced and
	trained user. Standards, such as BPEL appear to be promising candidates for
	this in particular when appropriate tools become available.</p>

	<h3>Data Source Management</h3>

	<p>For any IAM platform, access to a variety
	of data sources is essential. Some of these data sources can be considered
	fairly standardized (e.g. when crawling Web resources) while others are highly
	proprietary. While EILF cannot deliver ready-to-use solutions for all such data
	sources, the objective is to make available a set of standardized connectors
	(crawlers) for the most relevant data sources but also to provide a framework
	by means of which connectors to other data sources can easily be integrated.</p>

	<h3>Operating and Management</h3>

	<p>Operation, management and monitoring of the
	IAM solution are particularly relevant for enterprise-level systems. EILF will
	address that requirement by providing tools and approaches by means of which
	the current state of any EILF-based system can be monitored in terms of a general
	health check of the entire application as well as the single components. In
	addition, this shall allow verifying utilized hardware resources in order to
	foresee upcoming problems and bottlenecks. Standards, such as SNMP, will be
	addressed here.</p>

	<p>Additionally, enhancing the management
	capabilities of IAM technology in the area of backup management is on focus.
	One of the major aspects for a next generation IAM technology will be the
	ability to integrate in backup and maintenance procedures of enterprise
	companies. This fact will be more and more important, because the amount of
	required computing will increase depending on the increased usage of semantic
	technologies in the future.</p>

	<h3>Authentication and Authorization</h3>

	<p>Just as any other enterprise application,
	IAM systems as well require Authentication and Authorization be handled in a
	careful manner. This includes access rights with regards to information
	available in the system, permissions to (not) execute certain operations, but
	also user profiles which may potentially drive processes in the IAM system.
	Also, functional aspects such as single-sign-on (SSO) are very important.</p>

	<h3>Reporting</h3>

	<p>Analytics and Business Intelligence
	Reporting are essential parts to any IAM system as the information provided in
	such reports not only allows to optimize the usage of the system but also to
	identify missing information via knowledge gap analysis and similar approaches.
	</p>

	<p>The powerful reporting engine provided by
	Eclipse BIRT will very likely be utilized with EILF even though this aspect may
	be shifted to later releases of the project.</p>

	<h2>Out of Scope</h2>

	<p>As of today, the EILF project does not focus
	on the client (user interface) part of IAM systems. This limitation includes
	the integration into existing enterprise portals or other user interface
	approaches. Sample clients might potentially be provided but probably mainly
	for demonstration purposes.</p>

	<p>Also, the implementation of specific
	aspects of IAM (such as e.g. leading edge linguistic technology or ontology
	management components) is out of scope although the integration of such
	components in the EILF platform should be straightforward.</p>

	<p>In terms of completeness, EILF will provide
	basic working components while commercial vendors may offer more advanced
	implementations of those components, for example relating to scalability or
	feature sets.</p>

	<p>All of the above are subject to change
	should the need arise to more tightly integrate one or more of these aspects
	with the current scope of EILF.</p>

	<h2>Organization</h2>

	<h3>Mentors</h3>
	<ul>
	<li>Wayne Beaton, Eclipse Foundation</li>
	<li>Markus Knauer, Innoopract</li>
	</ul>

	<h3>Initial Committers</h3>

	<p>The initial committers will ensure the
	setup of the EILF platform as well as the initial implementation of both the
	platform and selected components. The agile development process will follow
	the Eclipse Development Process standards for openness and transparency. Hence, we will actively
	encourage contributions to EILF.</p>

	<p>The initial committers and contributors are:</p>

	<ul>
	<li>Georg Schmidt (brox IT-Solutions GmbH): architect,
	project lead and committer</li>
	<li>Igor Novakovic (empolis GmbH): team lead,
	committer</li>
	<li>Jürgen Schumacher (empolis GmbH):
	architect, committer</li>
	<li>Daniel Stucky (empolis GmbH): architect, contributor</li>
	<li>Sebastian Voigt (brox IT-Solutions GmbH):
	senior developer, committer</li>
	<li>Ralf Rausch (brox IT-Solutions GmbH): developer,
	contributor</li>
	<li>Ralf Schumann (brox IT-Solutions GmbH):
	developer, contributor</li>
	<li>Thomas Menzel (brox IT-Solutions GmbH):
	architect, committer</li>
	</ul>

	<h3>Code Contribution</h3>

	<p>empolis GmbH as well as brox IT-Solutions
	GmbH offer initial code contributions for some of the components based on their
	experience and long-standing development expertise in the information logistics
	area.</p>

	<h3>Interested Parties</h3>

	<p>Both empolis GmbH as well as brox
	IT-Solutions GmbH express their explicit interest in the project as also
	indicated by the list of committers and contributors above.</p>

	<p>Furthermore, Arexera Information
	Technologies GmbH (represented by their CTO, Bidjan Tschaitschian) as well as
	project partners on behalf of Siemens and SAP expressed their interest in the
	EILF project. </p>

	<p>More generally, universities and research
	centers are interested in using a standardized framework for search
	technologies to use it as a foundation for further research. The project fits
	also the interests of the Fraunhofer institutes as well as the DFKI (German Institute
	for Artificial Intelligence) because of its integration in processing chains of
	research projects. </p>

	<p>Moreover, EILF will be highly interesting
	for commercial software when it comes to integrating specific components and
	building blocks into a fully operational environment without having to care
	about the entire infrastructure from scratch. The cooperation between brox IT-Solutions
	GmbH and empolis GmbH is already a very good example of that: while the primary
	focus of brox technology is on accessibility and management of (unstructured)
	data, the key benefit of empolis technology is on indexing and semantic
	refinement of that data in a productive environment, however, both aspects
	need to be addressed simultaneously.</p>

	<p>Last but not least one of the main focuses
	of standardization departments of enterprise companies will be on
	standardization of building blocks in their companies. The EILF project is the
	first approach to deliver such a standardized approach for IAM technology.
	Therefore, also enterprise companies have a major interest on the outcome of
	the EILF project.</p>

	<h3>Relationships to other Eclipse projects </h3>

	<p>The following projects currently hosted by
	Eclipse might potentially become relevant in the course of EILF (in
	alphabetical order):</p>


	<ul>
	<li><b>BIRT</b> (<a
	href="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/">http://www.eclipse.org/birt/</a>)
	provides reporting features potentially relevant for the collection of information
	about usage of EILF components.</li>
	<li><b>BPEL</b> (<a
	href="http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/">http://www.eclipse.org/bpel/</a>) very
	likely will be used to orchestrate services as part of EILF.</li>
	<li><b>Corona</b> (<a
	href="http://www.eclipse.org/corona/">http://www.eclipse.org/corona/</a>)
	could potentially serve as a server-side runtime environment for EILF
	services.</li>
	<li><b>Connectivity</b> (<a
	href="http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/project_connectivity/">http://www.eclipse.org/datatools/project_connectivity/</a>)
	could deliver functionality for gathering content from diverse data
	sources.</li>
	<li><b>EclipseLink</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/">http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/</a>)
	can potentially provide components for the persistence of data inside EILF.</li>
	<li><b>Equinox</b> (<a
	href="http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/">http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/</a>)
	definitely will be utilized in order to implement componentization based
	on OSGi.</li>
	<li><b>Higgins</b> (<a
	href="http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/">http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/</a>)
	addresses identity management which will become relevant for EILF sooner
	or later.</li>
	<li><b>Target Management</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/">http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/</a>)
	could potentially be utilized for the administration and monitoring of an EILF
	installation that is deployed to distributed servers.</li>
	<li><b>Rich Ajax Platform</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/rap/">http://www.eclipse.org/rap/</a>)
	addresses more the client part but nevertheless can become relevant for
	the implementation of EILF clients.</li>
	<li><b>SOA Tools</b>
	(<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/stp/">http://www.eclipse.org/stp/</a>) as
	well as <b>Swordfish</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/">http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/</a>)
	both appear to be relevant when it comes to the service architecture of EILF.</li>
	<li><b>TPTP</b> (<a href="http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/">http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/</a>) very
	likely will be used for performance measurements and monitoring purposes.</li>
	</ul>


	<h3>User Community</h3>

	<p>EILF aims at delivering a de facto standard
	in the IAM area. Consequently, an active community providing solid feedback is
	essential. This includes a community of developers active in different areas
	(architecture, IAM components, UIs) as well as potential users of EILF who
	implement specific IAM systems.</p>

	<h3>Tentative Plan</h3>

	<h4>2008-03 Version 0.5</h4>

	<ul>
	<li>Basic architecture settled and
	implemented</li>
	<li>Simple search application available at
	least on demonstrator level</li>
	</ul>

	<h4>2008-06 Version 0.6</h4>

	<ul>
	<li>More components available e.g. supporting
	the integration of linguistic preprocessing</li>
	<li>More data sources accessible</li>
	</ul>

	<h4>2008-10 Version 1.0 Release 1.0</h4>

	<ul>
	<li>Orchestration of components / services </li>
	<li>Sample application</li>
	<li>Documentation and related material</li>
	<li>Full support of the OSGI architecture
	model</li>
	</ul>

	<h4>2009-03 Version 1.5</h4>

	<ul>
	<li>Improved support of Semantic Web
	features, ontologies etc.</li>
	</ul>
	</div>
	</div>
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