19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Scientific Informatics Challenges in EurAsia

The IST project WISTCIS: background, state of the art and prospectives

J. Bonnin, A.Gvishiani, T. Shulyakovskaia (shu@wdcb.ru), A. Soloviev
Contact: Mrs. Tatiana Shuliakovskaia, Institute of Physics of the Earth RAS, Russia

The project "New Methods of Working for Information Society Technologies Programme Promotion to Commonwealth of Independent States" (WISTCIS, IST-1999-14106) is coordinated by International Association EDNES ("Earth Data Network for Education and Scientific Exchange") and is funded by Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the European Union. WISTCIS uses many elements of the structure of Information Demonstration Centres (IDCs) deployed in focal organisations in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine and encourages EU-CIS teleworking for benefits of IST Programme. In this way WISTCIS ensures its continuity with Telematics Applications Programme (in 1996-1999) as far as IST collaboration between EU and the European CIS countries is concerned. The important objective of WISTCIS is to accelerate emergence and further development of telematics activities in the seven European CIS countries creating in this way a huge new potential market for IST products. Pursuing this objective WISTCIS facilitates new working contacts between producers of IST telematics products in the European Union countries and participating organisations in the CIS countries. Such contacts are deployed by the project into efficient East-West target oriented working teams. New methods of work are implemented for these teams to embed them into real environment of the Information Society. Thus WISTCIS is directly related with IST Programme as a whole, as well as with its key action (ii) "New methods of work and electronic commerce". The project also contributes to three other key actions. WISTCIS significantly contributes to expansion of IST Programme on huge community of the seven European CIS countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine. At the same time, the project WISTCIS is closely related with several concrete IST projects, in particular, CoBrow ("Collaborative Browsing Toolkit") developed by University of Ulm, Germany, and the certification service for electronic proposal submission developed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the Netherlands.