November 2010 NUI Galway Team Enabling the Future of the Web

A new project which aims to make it easier for government agencies and Web developers to access information from other organisations across the globe is being co-ordinated by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway. LOD Around-the-Clock (LATC) project is an EU co-funded project comprised of leading Linked Open Data researchers and practitioners. Co-ordinated by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway, LATC brings together a team of Linked Data researchers and practitioners from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), Institut für Angewandte Informatik, Universität Leipzig (Germany) and Talis Ltd (United Kingdom) who will, over the next two years, support people and institutions in consuming and publishing Linked Open Data, on the Web and in the Enterprise. The LOD cloud is a collection of over 200 datasets that offer open data published according to the Linked Data principles. In total over 25 billion interlinked facts are available in the LOD cloud from various domains: governmental data, media, health-care and life science, user-generated data (blogs, twitter, etc.), bibliographic data, geographical data, etc. The emerging Web of Linked Data is the largest source of multi-domain, real-world and real-time data that currently exists. As data integration and information quality assessment increasingly depends on the availability of large amounts of real-world data, these new technologists are going to need to find ways to connect to the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. With the explosive growth of the LOD cloud, which has doubled in size every 10 months since 2007, utilizing this global data space in a real-world set-up has proved challenging. The amount and quality of the links between LOD data sources remains sparse and there is no well-documented and cohesive set of tools that enables individuals and organizations to easily produce and consume Linked Open Data. A new project aims to change this, making it easier to connect to the LOD cloud by offering support to data owners, such as government agencies, Web developers who want to build applications with Linked Data, and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) that want to benefit from the lightweight data integration possibilities of Linked Data. In addition to the LATC core team, a large Advisory Committee with more than 35 members participates in the LATC activities: governmental organisations such as the UK Office of Public Sector Information and the European Environment Agency; researchers and practitioners such as the University of Manchester, University of Economics Prague, Vulcan Inc., CTIC Technological Center Spain, the Open Knowledge Foundation; last but not least standardisation bodies, including W3C (represented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee). Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway Professor Stefan Decker said, "Dissemination of data is an enabler for the smart economy. We are proud to co-ordinate the LATC project, as it plays a key role to help people and institutions to publish and consume Linked Open Data in Ireland and throughout Europe." ENDS