Project MATURE

MATURE is a Large-Scale Integrating Project (IP) funded by the European Commission in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in the area of Technology-Enhanced Learning. With a budget of 9.1 Million Euro over four years, the project brings together Europe's leading companies and research institutes in the areas of informal learning, organizational learning, knowledge management, business process management, and semantic technologies.

MATURE takes into account the lessons of the failures of organisation-driven approaches to technology-enhanced learning and the success of community-driven approaches in the spirit of Web 2.0. MATURE leverages the intrinsic motivation of employees to engage in collaborative learning activities, and aims at combining it with a new form of organisational guidance. For that purpose, MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks & processes or semantic structures. The goal of MATURE is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.

MATURE has four interlinked focus areas:

• an analysis of real-world maturing practices, resulting in a sound general conceptual model of the knowledge maturing process and ways to overcome barriers to it (particularly including motivational and social)
• a Personal Learning & Maturing Environment (PLME), embedded into the working environment, enabling and encouraging the individual to engage in maturing activities within communities and beyond
• an Organisational Learning & Maturing Environment (OLME), enabling the organisation to analyze and to take up community activities, to reseed innovation processes and to apply guiding strategies
• reusable Maturing Services for seeding and reseeding, and creating awareness of maturing-relevant individual and community activities

MATURE is a large-scale continuation of FZI's knowledge and ontology maturing research, and FZI (together with CIMNE as administrative coordinator) is responsible for coordinating the consortium of 12 partners from five European countries ,, including Graz University of Technology, SAP, Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, University of Paderborn, Pontydysgu, London Metropolitan University, BOC, University of Warwick, and Structuralia. The consortium is complemented by a growing network of associate partners from industry and research.

• Aided: EU FP7 (IP)
• URL: http://mature-ip.eu
• Contact: Andreas Schmidt ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Involved division: IPE