The Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC) has finalised the first draft of its work programme for 2007, outlining who will be eligible to apply for funding from the ERC, and how proposals will be evaluated.

The ERC is a new initiative, and is due to begin operating in 2007 as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). As the work programme explains, "The fundamental principle for all ERC activities is that of stimulating investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of excellence."

As Europe's population ages, improving healthcare and inclusion for the elderly is becoming a fast expanding field of research. But researchers in the new member states and candidate countries have been slow to take advantage of IST funding and cooperation in these areas. The EPIST project team sought to change that.

"The main problem is that research organisations and companies in the New Member Countries (NMCs) and Associated Candidate Countries (ACCs) don't know how EU research projects work," explains EPIST coordinator Ira Vater of European Business Associates in Italy.

Supporting Healthcare Professionals with Advanced Tools to Reduce their Loads
The medical practitioners at all levels are becoming more overloaded as the aging population of Europe increases. The health services of the EU can claim considerable credit for the decline in mortality over the last thirty years. However this success, particularly the fall in mortality rates among older people, has increased the demand for healthcare.

Researchers working on an EU-funded project have developed a new set of semantic Web tools which they claim will help users find the online news that matters to them most, more quickly.

The first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) begins yesterday in Athens. It is an important milestone agreed last November at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis (WSIS) as part of the drive to internationalise internet governance, to safeguard freedom online and to bridge the global digital divide.

Effective knowledge management is key to navigating the sea of information being made available using internet technologies. And participants in the IST project SEKT aim to lay the foundations for that greater effectiveness, by developing three core technologies for the semantic web.

A new website launched by Informationsforum RFID aims to educate German consumers about the possible applications of radio frequency identification (RFID) in everyday life and consumer products.

Users can click on any category, ranging from 'refrigerator' to 'children' and 'mobile phones' to 'medicine' to read a short passage on how RFID is affecting people's lives in these areas.