: "The goal of VISION was to provide input to the European Commission for planning their strategic objectives for special technical topics for the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The approach was relatively small scale: a core of seven partners and a network of around fifty companies, organised as six special interest groups covering different roads of interest.

'In this one-year project, we tried to find an iterative process to somehow compare the hundreds of opinions on the future into three bullet points,' says Andreas Abecker of Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI), Germany, and VISION coordinator. 'We were pretty much focused on the challenges and advances of new, or rather, next-generation technology.'

The visions harvested from special interest groups were reduced to a number of scenarios, which fitted into five specific RTD topic areas: semantic Web technology, knowledge discovery, mobile technologies, process modelling and groupware technology, and natural language processing. Roadmaps were drawn up that indicated which technical objectives might reasonably be fulfilled within a time frame of one, three and five years."  ¶ 19:51