EICSTES's primary objective was to offer statistics and to derive indicators about the European Science-Technology-Economy System in Internet. This objective has been achieved by developing new technologies (agents) to recover data from the web in an automatic way and by applying novel models and concepts to uncover existing relationships between actors of the New Economy. In order to test some of the proposed models, a series of case studies involving different and complementary aspects, especially relevant to the European scenario, have been analysed. As an ultimate goal, it is aimed to help measure and evaluate the impact of information technologies in European society as a whole, and on European citizens and their quality of living.

Due to the special nature of Internet, the initial intended coverage in the project was to be global, with a strong emphasis in countries of the OECD area. Such a wide approach was only possible for the global scenario descriptions, so the indicators that were obtained and the analysis performed on them covered only the European Union and Norway.

Finally, when the volume of data got so large that a full analysis of the EU scenario became virtually impossible with the resources that were available for the task, an alternative proposal was presented to reduce indicator compilation and analysis to just the six countries represented in the consortium plus Germany.

From the scientific/technological point of view the following more measurable objectives have been selected in order to make feasible the assessment of project progresses:

1. To develop automatic web data collection procedures using agent technology. Starting from the European R&D public system, a hybrid approach involving human and robot description should allow to describe over 20.000 publicly available web sites (institutional locations).
2. To obtain data about Internet economy from sources other than Internet itself.
3. To build statistical databases with the complex, large and multidimensional information obtained. The hipertextual nature of the Web, with a mean density of links exceeding 50 per webpage means that over 10 millions "sitations" (site citations) need to be compiled.
4. To derive indicators from that databases applying powerful methodological tools for quantitative processing such as graph theory and social network analysis.
5. To understand and generate models about the dynamics of the New Economy, uncovering relationships among research, industry and economic sectors, culture and society.
6. To apply quantitative methodologies to describe empirical case studies such as the network of University-Industry-Government relations, the new role of intermediation, the excessive fragmentation of some disciplines, the phenomenon of transborder co-operation, and the way electronic information is consumed by end-users.
7. To analyse the role of intermediaries in the cyberspace, the new emerging groups and the tasks they are facing in a self-organising environment.
8. To test web indicators for describing and analysing the emerging Information Society, socio-economic phenomena and the so-called 'New Economy'.
9. To show the indicators of the New Economy in an universal user-friendly environment based in new techniques of visualisation. This system will be customised for fulfilment the specific needs from industry, academy and public and private managers.
   

• Academic community: Colleagues interested in exchanging methods, raw data and expertise about the topics involved.
• R&D and Innovation related communities: Individual or collective researchers interested in the statistics of the impact of the Internet on their own work and the processes of scholarly communication. The institutions, other public and private bodies and individuals that use indicators in the evaluation and performance measurement of the innovation processes.
• Statisticians interested in new automatic methods of compiling data from the Internet (both presence and information consuming behaviour) and new techniques to develop second-generation visualisation systems (interactive, dynamic) based on the web.
• Information providers. In a broad sense, data gatherers, distributors or information brokers are using increasingly Internet for developing their job in one sense or another, so statistics about contents in the cyberspace are key both for local and global firms.
• Citizens and other end-users interested in recovering meaningful statistics from the web about the impact of the new economy and information society on their living-quality.
• Profit related organisations. Several needs from the industry, economy and even politicians require easy access to global, regional or topical scenarios specially customised about the composition, organisation, structure, relationships and dynamics of the Internet.