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ANSWER -
Academic Network for Software in Education and Research
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Summary of the project proposal submitted in the EU Telematics Application
Programme, Sector Information Engineering:
ANSWER addresses the needs of users like teachers/trainers, researchers, and developers in higher education, research centres and in R&D departments of enterprises by building, testing and validating a pilot application for an electronic marketplac
e for academic software.
The users' needs for computer aidance in education and research tasks are not satisfied neither by the commercial software market nor by the existing shareware ressources. However, academic software, which is all software developed in or for institutions
of higher education and research does fulfill these
users' requirements. The marketplace for academic software to be introduced is different from the shareware market and from the commercial software market because it
- applies thorough quality standards and
- is open to the wealth of prototypes and pre-commercial products.
The specific activities of the ANSWER project are
- involve users - teachers, researchers, developers, publishers and software companies - throughout the project lifecycle by establishing a permanent user forum
- build a demonstrator based on existing technology in the preparation phase
- cover a substantial content area in the pilot phase
- demonstrate the usability of the pilot in a number of virtual (discipline areas) and physical test sites, exploring and evaluating its market potential
- devote substantial efforts to the exploitation of the project's results, and to its uptake by the market.
The services envisaged by ANSWER, which are provided by an Internet-based network of dedicated servers, offer the users
- quality tested, evaluated and classified software and multimedia products
- software and information retrieval
- advanced communication facilities for interaction with software authors, providers and other users
- interactive uploading of software for test, evaluation and marketing in a common, user-friendly and transparent environment using familiar tools.
The overall aims of ANSWER are to
- strengthen the European academic software market
- improve the competitiveness of the European academic community and higher education
- improve the competitiveness of the European software industry.
