The vision of Cooperating Objects is quite new and needs to be understood in more detail and extended with inputs from the relevant individual communities that compose it. This enables us to better understand the impact on the research landscape and to steer the available resources in a meaningful way.

For this reason, the Cooperating Objects NETwork of excellence (CONET) has been created as the natural extension of the work started by the Embedded WiSeNts Coordination Action. The creation of a network of excellence enables the further establishment of the field of Cooperating Objects within the research and industrial community, thus strengthening the position of Europe in the research landscape.

CONET addresses explicitly Objective 3.7, target outcome b from the ICT Work Programme,
in which further development of the concept of Cooperating Objects is asked for.

Objectives:
The main goal of CONET is to build a strong community in the area of Cooperating Objects capable of conducting the needed research to achieve, in the long run, the vision of Mark Weiser. In his seminal paper from 1991, he envisioned a world in which computers are embedded in the environment and interact seamlessly with the users. Therefore, the objectives of CONET are the following:

1. Create a visible and integrated community of researchers on the topics related to Cooperating Objects capable of driving the domain in the coming years;
2. Identify, arise awareness and steer academic research efforts towards industry-relevant issues without forgetting fundamental scientific issues; make the community more reactive to novel issues and approaches, and to coordinate its efforts; establish tight relationships with the European industry, leveraging interactions with leading US institutions in the field;
3. Stimulate cooperation between researchers from the three domains in order to achieve a lasting and sustainable architecture that is able to cope with the vision of Cooperating Objects.