The UNINOVA Institute is a multidisciplinary, independent, and non-profit research institute employing around 180 persons, located in the metropolitan area of Lisbon. It was formed with the support of the University, industrial associations, a financial holding, and up to 30 companies.

The main aim of UNINOVA is to pursue excellence in scientific research, technical development and advanced training and education. The staff works closely with industry and universities, technological innovations being transferred to profitable business concepts and, existing products, further developed to match new industrial requirements.

Specialist Areas of Expertise of UNINOVA can be summarized as follows:

• Strategies for interoperability and information integration using standards. Standards’ reuse and Harmonization. Intelligent mapping. Meta-modeling.
• Intelligent infrastructures and architectures.
• Distributed Systems for Integrated Data Management and Electronic Commerce. Extended enterprises and smart organizations.
• Open platforms, Architectures and Toolkits to support and speed-up the implementation and adoption of local and web-based Electronic Data Interchange using and integrating standards and "de facto" standards, like UN/EDIFACT, ISO/STEP, XML, IDL, ...
• Platforms and services for automatised Web-based Conformance and Interoperability assessment activities. Frameworks for test-beds.
• Design and development of integrators and translators for applications and web front-ends in integrated manufacturing environments and electronic customer-manufacturer relationships.

UNINOVA contains various centres of excellence that expose a wide variety of competences. In particular the Centre of Systems and Technology, is well known for modelling, development of architectures, toolkits for standards-based platforms and methodologies for design and implementation of open systems. UNINOVA has managed and participated in many national and international research programmes (ESPRIT, BRITE, IMS, IST, NMP, etc) with experience in RTD in interoperability, industrial integration and standards based activities (e.g. ISO TC184/SC4).

UNINOVA is strongly committed to eEurope and to Lisbon Strategy being involved in many activities that support/enable the developments and actions towards the knowledge economy. UNINOVA participates in several actions and focus groups that work towards the eEurope goal: ATHENA-IP project as an enabler of business interoperability; SEEMseed to study the problematic of the forthcoming Single European Electronic Market; ECOLEAD-IP to research on Virtual Organizations as a support for enterprise collaboration and collaboration networks towards a new business ecosystem; and others, like prodAEC, INTEROP, VE-Forum, SMART-fm, VIVACE, Biopattern, CoSpaces.

UNINOVA’s Previous experience relevant to the tasks that have been attributed

UNINOVA is mainly responsible for coordinating the dissemination activities of iSURF and also supporting the exploitation activities. In addition to that they will be leading the evaluation of iSURF components and pilot applications. UNINOVA has been committed in several dissemination and exploitation activities. The mission of UNINOVA as a RTD institution is addressed in somehow by: 1) Promote scientific and technological development in the many areas of expertise exploited by the organization; 2) Promote technology transfer to industry and services segments either directly or by creating spin-offs; Promote dissemination of scientific results through a sustainable and active policy of publications, organization of scientific events, etc; 3) Promote internal cross-cooperation in research groups through joint activities (projects, co-supervising). UNINOVA has been the co-coordinator of the outreach activities (dissemination and exploitation) at the IST 2003 507849 ATHENA-IP project. In relation to the leadership of evaluation  and assessment activities: UNINOVA has been involved in the development of platforms and services for automatised Web-based Conformance and Interoperability assessment activities, frameworks for test-beds.and also the design and development of integrators and translators for applications and web front-ends in integrated manufacturing environments and electronic customer-manufacturer relationships.