Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs and co-chair of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), will open the event with a keynote address on 'Building Digital Content Marketplaces for Europe's Knowledge Societies and Beyond'.

He will present challenges and opportunities for cultural preservation and exploitation in today's Western 'Knowledge Societies' and highlight new digital-content marketplace scenarios and case studies for the online sharing and distribution of educational and knowledge resources. These include the Maknaz DR initiative, federating all national universities in Saudi Arabia; the CalState Marketplace initiative networking the California School and University district stakeholders, and Building Schools of the Future, a public sector initiative in the Birmingham district in the UK.

The keynote will be followed by presentations from leading organisations, including the British, Dutch, New Zealand, French, and Slovak National Libraries; universities, as well as content and solutions providers such as the BBC. The event is expected to attract some 150 delegates from all over the world.

On the evening of 24 June, Giunti Labs is organising a 'Deep Dive Technology Workshop' entitled 'Using HarvestRoad Hive DR for Building Rich, Mobile, and Virtual World Repositories for Innovative Knowledge, Learning, and Information Dissemination Scenarios'. During the event, the new content indexing and caching, Web 2 classification, and mobile-delivery features in Hive 4 will be presented.

The introduction will also outline the open-archive discovery and harvesting scenarios developed in leading EU R&D projects such as Sculpteur, where Giunti Labs interfaced its DR technology with leading EU museum archives such as the UK's National Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum; France's Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Museè de France and Museè de Cherbourg; and Italy's Uffizi Gallery using Z39.50, Zing, and SRW harvesting protocols and query by samples for 2D and 3D artefacts retrieval.

Developed for Deepmatrix and VRML, the technology is now under porting on the Sun Wonderland Virtual Worlds and DarkStar collaboration platforms in the new IRMOS project, one of several projects awarded to Giunti Labs by the EU. The effort will add service-oriented architecture (SOA) along with virtual and mobile- content delivery scenarios to this initiative.

"We need to develop an open and interoperable ecosystem bringing together open archives from museums, libraries, and eGovernment initiatives to deliver new-generation personal performance support and information access to our citizens, learners, and trainees. This will help them develop new skills and competencies rapidly", commented Guinti Labs' Cardinali.