We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we would be watching to see how the U.K. election fallout could affect semantic web prospects. And the first axe to fall has hit the Institute of Web Science, which was to be headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (pictured left) and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt. Former PM Gordon Brown had announced funding for the Institute in March, to the tune of £30 million.

The announcement from the UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) indicates that as part of its plan to reach £836 million in savings this year it is cutting £18 million that includes “funding for the Institute of Web Science, a proposal which is still under development, and low priority projects like the SME Adjudicator.”

That would seem to leave about half the originally proposed budget intact, but a BBC report seems to indicate the cuts take down the whole project. The article quotes a spokesperson from BIS saying that “the government remained committed to investing in internet technology research elsewhere but that it “cannot support” the creation of the institute in the current economic climate.”

A statement posted by Berners-Lee and Shadbolt (pictured left) today say that they are disappointed but understand “that immediate decisions had to be made about what not to start, pending a wider review of priorities in the Spending Review.” The statement also clarifies questions some have been asking about whether this impacts on the U.K. government’s open linked data initiative. “Our understanding,” it reads, “is that the data.gov.uk portal will in fact grow significantly in the months to come…..As we enter a phase of cutting back on many things, the linked open data movement is a crucial tool, for government, public and industry to get the most value from the important resources being opened up. During times of austerity, transparency is essential, and open data will play a crucial role.”

The Institute of Web Science was not exclusively semantic web oriented, but certainly that would have been a big part of its agenda. At its announcement it was given the mission to explore the use of Web 3.0 technologies to “take the web to a whole new level by publishing data in a linkable format so that users and developers can see and exploit the relationships between different sets of information.” It was to be a center for conducting research, collaborating with businesses, identifying opportunities for social and economic benefit, assisting in commercialising research and helping government stimulate demand through procurement. Behind its planned work was the idea “that it could generate large-scale economic benefits for the UK in the global market for web and Internet technologies.”

Dr. John Breslin of DERI Galway (and one of our Semantic Web 100, says he thinks that the cut of funding for the Institute of Web Science “is a pity and perhaps somewhat short sighted. Both Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt have put on a brave face and cited the UK Government’s continued support for providing more open data. But I think the Institute was going to be more than this – providing a place where many domains (government, education, sciences, health, etc.) could have benefited from a large, dedicated team of people from different disciplines (computational, mathematical, social sciences, economic and legal) working on understanding the Web and how to improve the Web for everyone.”

No doubt, he says, that this work will continue in somewhat reduced form through the various groups who are already working on this. “But it’s harder for existing groups to bring together the broad set of skills (disciplines) that the IoWS would have created – it’ll take more time to grow those interdisciplinary teams without the promised funding the IoWS would have acquired. Since Semantic Web would have been one of the key technologies used by the computational discipline, we can of course imagine what kinds of things this Institute would have contributed to the area, but I don’t imagine it will be a fatal blow or anything because there is such momentum behind the Semantic Web and Web Science that we may see something emerge on a smaller scale, and if not in the UK, hopefully somewhere else.”

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