CRATOS (Center for Research on the Applications of Telematics to Organizations and Society) research activities are directed towards the invention and the study of new applications of information and communication technologies to industry, commerce and, more generally, to all of society.

Telematics is the discipline that deals with the systems deriving from the combined use of information and communication technology. It came about with the first networks for the transmission of electronic data between computers, and developed above all with the introduction of packet switching and of digitalization; while the former led to the Internet, the first global telematic network, the latter extended the benefits of the combination of communication and computing to information of all types, including audio, video, and fixed images.

The progress of telematics has always been fueled more by technology than by applications. Only in recent times have we woken up to the real use that telematics can be put to in the manufacturing, commerce and service industries, as well as to the profound influence that its widespread introduction into daily life will have on society in general. A small, but growing, group of researchers have therefore begun to shift their attention from the problems of technology to applications, ranging from engineering to the socio-economic impact of telematics.

CRATOS is one of the fruits of this current tendency: the nucleus from which it was born is made up of experts in telematic technologies (above all of multimedia communication and computing), interested in the applications of such technologies, and who bring with them technical know-how which is rare in the environments in which CRATOS operates.

Amongst the research topics that CRATOS considers part of its "jurisdiction" are Internet and similar network applications (intranet and extranet, for example): electronic commerce, advertising, multimedia conferencing, communications (telephone, videophone), telework, information retrieval (above all on the World Wide Web, but also from various databases), video-on-demand, customer assistance, virtual business, and so on. There are also very similar topics concerning future broadband telematic networks "with integrated services", designed specifically for multimedia traffic. One of the "meta-application" problems still to be faced concerns the choice of services that these networks will have to offer in order to facilitate the creation and use of new applications. Finally, we should mention multimedia applications (with different "meta-questions" regarding, for example, the structuring methods of such applications, or the use of multimedia techniques to facilitate access to telematic systems by reluctant or untrained persons).