November 2006 Next Generation Web Critical to Knowledge Economy Success

20 November 2006: Key next generation technologies for the Internet are being developed at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway, which will be the backbone of Ireland's knowledge economy. Professor Manfred Hauswirth, Vice Director of DERI, states that, "The success and growth of the knowledge economy in this country will be linked to our ability to easily create, share and retrieve information and data across organisations. To make this process efficient it has to be mechanised, which can only be achieved through self description of data and processes, namely by adding semantics into them."

Using semantics, (tagging data to allow computers understand its meaning) DERI is developing technologies enabling people, organisations and systems to better collaborate and interoperate. The work being carried out by over eighty researchers, the biggest project of its kind in the world, will also involve other aspects of the digital society spanning from the public sector, e.g., health or governmental administration, to the personal domain, e.g., community portals which support novel ways for people to share information and interact.

Professor Hauswirth was speaking in advance of Research Day at DERI on 23 November, which will see leading academics and industry experts convene at NUI Galway to receive an update on the technologies being developed by the institute and discuss the future of informatics in Ireland. Chaired by DERI's Directors Prof. Stefan Decker and Prof. Manfred Hauswirth, the day will offer a forum for researchers and practitioners coming from a wide variety of areas to discuss common interests, share and exchange expertise and establish new connections inside Irish academic institutions as well as with industry.

According to Professor Hauswirth, "The mission of DERI is to establish semantics as the core pillar of modern computer engineering. We are three years into this huge and exciting project and are on the cusp of tagging the entire web, which will lead us into the next generation of the Internet and computing. We have over eighty of the best researchers in the world, from 16 different countries, working in Galway to drive this project forward in tandem with the rise of the knowledge economy."

The DERI Research Day will be held in DERI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway and attendance is by invitation only. Presentations will be made on topics including Web Services eXecution Environment; Semantic Web Search Engine; Information Centric Access in the case of SIOC; and Large Scale Sensor Networks.