InConTec was founded in the beginning of 2008 by former managers of Mentor Graphics Corp. This organization is focussed on Innovation, Research, Development, and Consulting services in the area of electronic design automation (EDA), data and process management, and cross-domain engineering methods. It is also focused on collaboration in the engineering and manufacturing process and provides solutions for design data management and knowledge management for the electronic design process. This covers the Electronic and electro-mechanical design process for printed circuit boards and electrical systems for i.e. the automotive, aerospace, consumer electronic, telecommunication and medical electronic industries. InConTec will concentrate in standardized formats to support the complete design chain related to the production of printed circuit boards and mechatronic systems. These standards are related to engineering cross-domain collaboration and preservation of engineering requirements and their data. InConTec will also cooperate with several Universities in Germany in the area of research and development (e.g. Georg-Simon-Ohm-University Nürnberg – Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, FernUniversität Hagen – Faculties for Multimedia and Internet Applications; Information Systems and Databases). It is also an important strategic goal of InConTec to commercialize and market research results of national and European founded projects.

Xerox Corporation is a world-wide player in the market for document systems and services. Xerox offers products and services to print, copy, store, scan, transfer, and publish both paper and digital documents. The company’s growing portfolio of global, industry-based document solutions combines services, software, and hardware into partnerships that bring high value to its customers’ mission-critical business processes. Xerox is positioning itself to become a leader in the market for internet document services and knowledge management solutions. It is one of the few companies capable of managing information in both paper and electronic form throughout the document lifecycle. The Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) in Grenoble, France will be the Xerox entity collaborating in the project. Xerox Research Centre Europe is committed to inventing and designing document technologies that enhance productivity and creativity in the workplace. It pursues a vision of document technology where language, physical location and media impose no barrier to effective use. Its specific mission is to become a Centre of Excellence for the understanding of document processes and for the invention of technologies that support them. XRCE employs ca. 100 researchers and developers. XRCE forms partnerships, collaborates with a wide range of European research organizations, and works with the business divisions of Xerox and with customers to understand their strategy and requirements. The Centre takes a strongly inter-disciplinary approach, ranging from linguistics, cognitive vision, computer science, statistics and mathematics to sociology. Core competencies relevant to the project include machine learning, parsing, semantics, document models, contextual document transformation.

The PHILIPS Innovation Lab (iLab) is the international Know-how Centre of Philips Consumer Electronics. The iLab drives and provides new concepts and features creating innovations that have substantial positive business impact for Philips Consumer Electronics. Philips Consumer Electronics is world player in a wide range of products:

TV products: Flat (LCD, Plasma), CRT
Video products: HTiB, DVD, DVD+RW, VCR, TV-VCR
Audio products: Systems, separates, portables
Computer monitors: LCD and CRT
Consumer communications: Mobile phones, cordless digital phones
Set top boxes
Accessories: Headphones, recordable media

The characteristics of products (incl. services) of Philips support the brand-promise "Sense & Simplicity" by being designed around the customer and by being easy to experience.Philips Consumer Electronics focuses on displays for home entertainment and infotainment and productivity and the vision is ‘A world where consumers enjoy great entertainment experiences and services whenever and wherever they want’. The connectivity of products of Philips enables location-independency of entertainment and infotainment experiences with CE devices without the hassle of manual network configuration which is typical in the PC domain and without the need to install/use connection wires to get the audio/video quality that can be obtained with connection wires and enables refinement and with acceptance of interoperability standards for connectivity in CE-devices. Products of Philips enable location independent entertainment experiences with CE devices using remote services offered on the Internet.

The DNB is the national library and national bibliographic information centre for the Federal Republic of Germany. It is responsible for the collection, processing and bibliographic indexing of all German and German-language publications issued since 1913. DNB cooperates closely with all national and international library institutions and organisations. Within this context, it has a leadership role in the development and application of common rules and standards for Germany. The cataloguing records created for the German national bibliography are kept in a data pool, from which manifold bibliographic services are generated in either printed or electronic form. These services are constantly being upgraded, like for example the service "DNB online" facilitating the transfer of bibliographic records in a structured form into the customer's system, and the document delivery service enabling to order excerpts from publications available in the DNB. Furthermore, the DNB hosts and maintains a number of national reference tools and authority files (union data catalogue of serials, name authority file, subject heading authority file) that are constantly being enhanced both in content and technically. As the national library, the DNB is striving for solutions concerning archiving, access, and long-term preservation of electronic publications. Since 1998 online dissertations and theses have been collected, archived, and made available on a document server. Since 2000 electronic periodicals have been collected, and since 2001 the DNB has been operating a submission interface for online publications. From 2006 onwards, born-digital publications have been included in the German legal deposit law, and therefore the DNB is also responsible for collecting and archiving Germany’s digital memory, including Web content. For several years now, the DNB has been taken serious initiatives to establish long-term preservation policies for the digital collections (most notably, the “kopal” project).

The University Magdeburg now comprises 9 faculties and almost 13,000 students and is becoming increasingly important as a centre of education and research. It plays an important role in the regional capital Magdeburg, which is developing into a centre of business, scholarship and culture. The Advanced Multimedia and Security Lab (AMSL) from Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jana Dittmann at the Computer Science Faculty is specialised in multimedia specific aspects of security from the technical and computer science dimension as well as from the user perception, user interaction and legal dimension. In accordance to the overall research perspective AMSL is building research expertise from national and international research projects such as: FP6 NoE Ecrypt (European Network of Excellence in Cryptology), FP6 NoE Biosecure (Biometrics for Secure Authentification), FP6 NoE Similar (The European taskforce creating human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication), EU-India Cross Cultural Programme project CultureTech (Cultural Dimensions in Digital Multimedia Security Technology), Illustration watermarking - A Novel Concept of Object-based Annotation Watermarking (German Research Foundation), Illustration Watermarking for Digital Images: An Investigation of Hierarchical Signal Inheritances for Nested Object-based Embedding (EOARD), Security in Automotive (National Excellence Initiative), TrojDetA - Detection of Trojan Horses (BSI), SAMMI. - Semantical Analysis of Multimedia Data (BSI), Stirmark for Audio & Steganography and Steganalysis in VoIP (EOARD), Security in digital Multimedia Archives (Nestor II).

Global Information Technology (GLOBIT) GmbH is a German software development and consulting company that specializes in structured document storage, management, publishing, hosting, distribution, and collaborative scientific community information service support. Main business are integrated application solutions for the planning, organisation, and execution of national and international conferences and congresses The basis of these services is the content management, information, publishing, hosting, and communication system Congress Online, GLOBIT’s core software product. Furthermore, the company is active in publishing and information services for scientific communities and the scientific publishing business. For this business segment, GLOBIT is currently developing new products and services.GLOBIT was founded in 1997 as a spin-off company from the Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems (IPSI) of the Fraunhofer Institute. In 2002 GLOBIT became a subsidiary of CPO HANSER SERVICE GmbH, a professional congress organizer. Through this affiliation, the company is well-positioned in national and international associations as the IAPCO professional congress organizers association, the INCON marketing company, and the GCB convention bureau.GLOBIT has been engaged in several R&D projects in the area of web-based event information systems, digital libraries, collaborative community support portals, long-term preservation, and application solutions for the semantic web as well as electronic commerce solutions for professional organizations and outsourcing services to scientific and other innovation oriented communities of practice.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) is recognized as a premier institution, frequently ranked number one and consistently among the top three U.S. LIS schools. The School recruits faculty with strong theoretical and methodological foundations who understand libraries and the broader context of information systems and services. In its most recent ranking of LIS programs, U.S. News and World Report ranked GSLIS the top program in the nation. Current faculty projects include collaborations on campus with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Institute for Competitive Manufacturing, the University Library and the Center for Children's Books, and off campus with the Illinois State Library and individual libraries. The IMIRSEL (International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) project provides an unprecedented platform for evaluating Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Music Digital Library (MDL) techniques, by bringing together large corpora and significant computational resources with the necessary rights management and technical infrastructure to support a variety of MIR/MDL research areas. The standardized research collection being deployed represents a large and diverse corpus of musical examples, which we are hosting in our secure environment for use in evaluating MIR/MDL algorithms. Grid services and National Center for Supercomputing Application's (NCSA) D2K (Data-to-Knowledge) machine learning environment provide a powerful, high performance, and secure framework for designing, optimising, and executing complex MIR/MDL evaluation applications. IMIRSEL provides a community resource for researchers who would otherwise not be able to afford the content rights and computational resources to carry out large-scale MIR/MDL evaluations. M2K (Music-to-Knowledge) is a key element of the IMIRSEL project. M2K represents the music-specific set of D2K modules designed to create a Virtual Research Lab (VRL) for MIR/MDL development, prototyping and evaluation. UIUC bring unrivalled expertise to SHAMAN in terms of terascale audio mining and applications development.