Anna Leach of the Wall Street Journal reports, “New scientific research must be published for free online, the vice-president of the European Commission said, in a move designed to increase the knowledge pool open to small business and lead to more innovative products. All scientists receiving European Union funding will have to publish their results in an open-access format, Neelie Kroes, the commissioner responsible for Europe’s digital agenda, said Monday in Stockholm.  Ms. Kroes also  launched the global Research Data Alliance — a group committed to pooling and co-ordinating scientific data so it can be shared better.”

Leach continues, “Opening up scientific research is good for small business, said Victor Henning, CEO of British startup Mendeley, which aims to make academic research more connected. He has noticed the demand for access to academic research from small businesses. Read more

The winner of the Semantic Web Challenge at November’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) was EventMedia Live, a web-based environment that exploits real-time connections to event and media sources to deliver rich content describing events that are associated with media, and interlinked with the Linked Data cloud.

This week, it will begin a one-year effort under a European Commission-funded project to align its work with the Nokia Maps database of places, so that mobile users of the app can quickly get pictures of these venues that were taken by users with EventMedia’s help.

A project of EURECOM, a consortium combining seven European universities and nine international industrial partners, EventMedia Live has its origins in the “mismatch between those sites specializing in announcing upcoming events and those other sites where users share photos, videos and document those events,” explains Raphaël Troncy, assistant professor at the EURECOM: School of Engineering & Research Center, Multimedia Communications, and one of the project’s leaders.

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What can semantic search do for your enterprise? One example comes from the recently launched Searchbox online semantic search engine by the company of the same name (which formerly was known as salsaDev).

One of the vendor’s biggest customers is the European Commission, according to Nicolas Gamard, CEO of the Switzerland-based company. That early adopter of Searchbox is using the technology for improving search related to its public grants funding, which amounts to tens of billions of dollars since 2007. Before deploying Searchbox, both researchers and its own commissioners struggled with conducting searches across 15 different repositories, as they looked for previously funded projects and partnership possibilities across the continent, for example. Tooling through a research grant PDF document of some 150 to 600 pages was another time-consuming issue, he says.

“It was like a full-time job just to look at all the different data sources. Things were not formatted in the same way – they used different terms and structures,” Gamard says.

Today, Searchbox powers a single web application for the European Commission, where all such content is interlinked together. “So, if a researcher is looking at a grant, we suggest all the related relevant research grants, partnership opportunities across Europe, all previously funded projects, and all the information he or she needs,” says Gamard. “That’s done automatically so that, within a single look, within 5 minutes you can have identified all the research opportunities right for you.”

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The Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN software has been chosen to power the European Commission’s new open data portal. The article reports, “The European Commission (EC) has awarded a contract to create an open data portal website, where data produced by European Commission services will be freely available. Belgian company TenForce will lead the project to deliver the portal, supported by Leipzig University’s Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI), and UK-based non-profit the Open Knowledge Foundation. Users will be able to search for information in a flexible range of ways, for example by subject area, country, and region, and to visualise the data or download it for re-use in research, campaigns or commercial applications. The EC and the contracted partners will run workshops and other outreach activities, to raise awareness of and interest in the data among companies, researchers, journalists and policy groups.” Read more

European Commission vice president Neelie Kroes has announced the commission’s new package of policies related to open data and public sector information. Jonathan Gray reports, “The announcement contained some very strong language in support of open data. Open data is the new gold, the fertile soil out of which a new generation of applications and services will grow. In a networked age, we all depend on data, and opening it up is the best way to realise its value, to maximise its potential.” Read more