Overview
The POSITION project was established thanks to extreme diversity of European positioning projects.
The main objective of POSITION was to create synergy between European projects dealing with positioning and to promote awareness and exploitation of their results to a wider European audience.
With that perspective, all the European projects dealing with positioning were identified and those that might best benefit from receiving support from POSITION were selected. Projects' needs were elicited by means of telephone conversations and meetings with project coordinators. The selection process performed in the context of WP 1.2 "Selection" has resulted in the:
- Selection of 14 ongoing projects corresponding to the projects that should receive direct support from POSITION,
- Classification of the completed, or well-advanced, positioning-related projects, according to their estimated ability to support the top-14 projects.
The selection took into account the resources available within POSITION. It guaranteed that the tasks to be carried out in the next phases of the project remain manageable and realistic. The next step in the selection process was to reach agreement with the European Commission on this selection in order to stabilise the working basis for the future POSITION activities.
Funding
Results
Depending on their needs, the support provided to the selected projects took the form of:
- Provision of targeted information (9 projects had specific information needs);
- Support to dissemination activities (42 projects were supported).
The two main tools for supporting projects' dissemination activities were the website (www.position-project.org) and the so-called "villages". These were supplemented by POSITION promotional activities which included; many presentations at conferences, articles published in newsletters and magazines, and direct provision of information to organisations such as the European Commission (EC), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Galileo Joint Undertaking (GJU), European ITS organisations and National Contact Points (NCPs).
The POSITION website was made available online in November 2002 and was updated regularly from that date. It was a comprehensive reference source of information technologies, applications and services relevant to positioning and acts as a show case for more than one hundred European funded projects (from FP5, FP6 and ESA) as well as a number of national initiatives. It enabled access to several tens of project abstracts, project websites and project documents and allowed users to search two downloadable spreadsheets which categorise projects by the:
- Eighty-three technology, domain and application specific parameters;
- Involvement of over 500 organisations from across Europe and worldwide.
The "villages" consisted of two large exhibition stands on which several European research consortia were invited to demonstrate the tangible results of their projects. These stands were organised at two major events, EyeForTravel Europe 2004 (London, May 2004) and ITS in Europe 2004 (Budapest, May 2004) whose focus fitted well with POSITION's objectives.
The POSITION dissemination activities were complemented by:
- The assessment of the effectiveness of the individual projects’ exploitation plans as described in their Technology Implementation Plans (TIPs);
- Recommendations for future research programmes in the positioning area.