Irish Eyes are Smiling on Semantic Web Research

By SemanticWeb.com on February 5, 2009 2:52 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland Galway recently received second-term funding — to the tune of 23 million pounds over five years — for its continuing work researching technologies that underpin the semantic web.

The funding comes both from the state and from industry contributions, pointing to the work’s value both as a research institution for the web on web technologies but also as having a role in the development of Irish industry.

“We have a lot of industry partners ranging from Cisco, Nortel, and Ericsson, to also smaller indigenous companies working with us together,” says Stefan Dekker, director of DERI. Their interest in seeing the research institution move forward with its mission of exploiting the semantic web for people, organizations and systems to collaborate and interoperate on a global scale is driven by the understanding that it’s time to move away from stovepipes of information to a world of interlinked data that has the potential to transform industries ranging from e-business to health care and life sciences.

One problem Dekker points to that has impacted or someday soon will impact a growing number of businesses is the fact that new kinds of information are coming online based on sensors and sensor networks, “and we still don’t know how to deal with it and integrate the information they deliver with the information already present or emerging on the web. Right now the web and the real world are still being separated.”

The web browser has to get broader, more interactive, and more immediate to support the meeting of the real world and virtual worlds — semantic collaboration, semantic search, semantic information mining, semantic middleware, and a multitude of other skills DERI is building expertise in underlies this goal to make knowledge “interconnected, universal, and all-encompassing … explicit with a specific goal,” as Dekker puts it.

As a trivial example, he posits that sensors integrated onto a supermarket store shelf could track whether it is stocked with milk, information that could be delivered to customers via a web browser, and perhaps even integrated into a route planner that gets them to the closest store that has milk in the shortest time. A more enterprise-oriented example comes in the form of what one of DERI’s partners–Celtrak, a fleet monitoring, vehicle tracking, toll road services provider in Ireland — sees as a future possibility as knowledge becomes explicit and interconnected.

“They see the semantic web helping to manage information coming from sensors so they can deliver solutions to companies they do fleet management for,” he says — for instance, using information from sensors deployed in vehicles with other data on the web, such as weather conditions in a particular area, and help customers use information for route re-routing or other activities.

Patenting and licensing and commercialization of its projects with industry are critical for some of what DERI is accomplishing, but an equally important part of its efforts are its open source strategy.

The KDE Linux Strategy

“There are certain things which you can develop and sell and certain you had better make open to generate an impact on. The Web itself is a good example,” he said. “If the web had been hidden — it would have died if it were licensed.” As an example, the social semantic desktop developed by DERI is now in the KDE Linux operating system.

“Almost every Linux system comes with the KDE Desktop, and that creates a foundation of application developers and a market,” he says. “So also that is quite important and strategic.”

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