Short answers, pulled from the story.
LOBSTER was a European passive network monitoring system funded by the European Commission. It deployed 36 sensors across nine countries to gather internet traffic information for performance research and security incident detection. The project ran until 2007.
LOBSTER could monitor traffic across 2.3 million IP addresses at any one time. Its sensors were operated by several organisations spread across nine European countries.
More than 400,000 internet attacks were claimed to have been detected by LOBSTER during the course of the project.
MAPI, the Monitoring Application Programming Interface, is a programming interface for building network monitoring applications. It was developed in the context of the SCAMPI and LOBSTER projects and underpinned all measurement applications deployed on LOBSTER sensors. MAPI allowed developers to express complex monitoring needs and balance overhead against the volume of data collected.
SCAMPI preceded LOBSTER. It was a European project active in 2004-5 that aimed to develop a scalable monitoring platform for the internet. LOBSTER grew directly out of SCAMPI's work.
After LOBSTER ceased in 2007, its work fed into the initiative labelled IST 2.3.5 Research Networking testbeds, which aimed to contribute to improving internet infrastructure in Europe.