From ACM TechNews:
Big Data at Your Service
CORDIS News
(07/25/12)
The growing use of information and communication technology is generating vast volumes of structured and unstructured data that present an opportunity that European Union (EU) research initiatives are seeking to take advantage of by promoting open data. For example, the EU-funded Weknowit project, also called emerging, collective intelligence for personal, organizational, and social use, has devised a platform for converting unstructured user-produced content into a new collective intelligence with many uses. Project coordinator Yiannis Kompatsiaris says the platform includes "meaningful topics, entities, points of interest, social connections, and events." Projects that could benefit scientific research include the data infrastructures ecosystem for science effort, which has developed an interoperable framework to enable the sharing of different e-infrastructures' computing and software resources irrespective of location, format, technology, language, protocol, or workflow. Some EU projects are exploring the commercial monetization of structured data, one being the commercially empowered linked open data (LOD) ecosystems in research project. Its objective is to develop a robust LOD commercialization platform based on a value-creation-chain among traditional and nontraditional roles in data marketplaces. Meanwhile, the linguistically motivated semantic aggregation engines project focuses on the leveraging of language and semantic search technology to enhance the online experience.
