In Europe, a large variety of roadmap initiatives exist, which are highly relevant for the machine tool sector. Nevertheless, companies as well as research centres working in this field are not able to exploit and use these roadmaps for their business or research because they significantly differ in content, structure and language. Therefore, the aim of the NEXT meta-roadmap is to enable machine tool builders to easily access and understand content and relevance of the initiatives by providing a publicly available, well structured thesaurus of topics addressed in existing roadmaps and to develop an internet platform displaying the topics of the roadmaps by linking them in a keyword based structure.
New technical, organizational and economic topics arising from Next in order to set up excellent vehicle for the advanced training of researchers and other staff, research managers, industrial executives (in particular for SMEs), and to set up new academic courses for young students in order to stimulate them towards research and careers in science.
