Project Management

The Project management will be assured by the following relevant roles:

Project Manager
Exploitation manager
Work-package Leaders
Technical Contributors

and by the following Project Bodies:

Project Coordination Committee (PCC)
Project Exploitation Board
Work-package Teams.

Project Manager: The mandate of the Project Manager is to represent the Project, report to the Commission, monitor overall performance of the project, ensure accomplishment of the technical objectives, promote project visibility, promote dissemination of project results in the relevant international forums, promote acceptance of project results, administer project resources and monitor project spending.
Exploitation Manager: S/he will be responsible for coordinating exploitation activities undertaken by the Project Exploitation Board (PEB) in close cooperation with the Project Coordination Committee (PCC).
Work-package Leaders: They are responsible for the performance of Work-packages, and they must be committed to the Work-package for at least five man months per year.
Technical Contributors: Technical Contributors are specialised staff provided by the partners. They could be either people active on a stable basis into a Work-package, or people who contribute from time to time on specific tasks related to the work-plan (external contributors).
Project Coordination Committee: The PCC is chaired by the Project Manager and constituted by one representative from each Partner, and is the main decision body of the Consortium. It is in charge of all formal decisions regarding technical direction of the work, proper interrelation between Work-packages, relations with IST Office, policies for promotion of results, administrative arrangements. In view of minimising management overhead and project costs, partners providing the Project Manager, and the Work-packages Leaders are required to appoint the same person as their official representative in the Project Coordination Committee.
Project Exploitation Board: The PEB will be chaired by the Project Exploitation Manager, and composed by the Exploitation Managers of each partner. It will monitor the state of the art in the domains of content-based information technologies, W3C activities, Web publishing, and digital libraries. It will be responsible for planning the dissemination and exploitation strategies for the consortium, to be approved by the PCC.
Work-package Teams: They are constituted of the technical contributors. Each team will be chaired by a Work-package Leader, and it will be in charge of carrying out the technical work described in Section \ref{Workpackages}.

Decision Process

Decisions will normally be taken by seeking consensus. However, after a reasonable amount of time has been allowed to illustrate and defend of conflicting positions, in order to avoid deadlock in project operational progress, the approval of two-third majority of the partners will be sufficient. If the decision being taken is unacceptable to partners found in the minority positions, the resolution of the conflict will be elevated to each partner's higher executive level. If no resolution is possible, than the standard ``red flag'' procedure will be used, as a last resort. Either the PCC or the Project Manager can initiate the conflict resolution procedure.

Information Flow

Information flow within the Project will be ensured by exchange of internal technical papers, notification of relevant new publications technologies or standards, and reports from external meetings. All technical documentation generated by the project should be exchangeable in electronic format, according to a set of guidelines to be agreed at project start-up. The project Manager will enforce adherence to these guidelines. Only strictly formal correspondence will be exchanged by ordinary mail and telefax. Urgent correspondence over e-mail will be sent with a request for explicit acknowledgement.

The Coordinating Partner will be responsible to prepare and maintain a Web page of the project and a CVS repository (also available via Web). The CVS repository is meant to keep the trace of the overall progress of the Project, and it will be used by the PCC to monitor the state of advancement of the work. Each partner periodically submit reports to the prime contractor, listing all technical contributions, publications, meeting attendance and other information which may help in understanding the provided effort and cost figures.

The Project will establish a high quality Web site for internal and external communications. It will be operational as from one month of the commencement date and will be maintained during the project duration. The ``members only'' area will include e.g. all private deliverables, progress and management reports, and cost statements. The open area will include the project presentation as defined in Appendix 2 of the ``Guidelines for Contract Preparation'' document, all public deliverables, and any relevant information suggested by the Project Exploitation Board.

Quality Procedures

For all deliverables, the following review procedure will be adopted: release by the Work-Package Leader, two-week review period for comments by the PCC, two-week amendment period to incorporate PCC recommendations, one-week balloting period for approval by the PCC.

Confidentiality and IPR handling

Matters related to Confidentiality and IPR handling will be defined in the ``Consortium Agreement''. As regards literature papers originated from work in the Project, there will be two categories of papers:

Project Endorsed Publications, requiring notification and approval by the PCC.
Project-related publications, only requiring notification to the PCC. They must contain an acknowledgement of support by the project Consortium and, if required by the PCC, a disclaimer that the views are not necessarily those of the Consortium.

Concerning possible contributions to Standards, they will be directly submitted by project members.