A collaborative research agreement has been signed between the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI). The agreement will generate close collaborations between researchers at both institutes and is expected to lead to a number of funded projects.

Work is already underway on a joint project in the area of semantic data integration and application.

DERI is one of the world’s leading international web science research institutes, with over 140 researchers. With its researchers of over 500 people, KISTI is specialised institute providing science technology and innovation services to promote national competitiveness. KISTI’s agenda is to develop and secure local and foreign information resources, strategic information analysis and advanced supercomputing and information infrastructure.

Professor Stefan Decker, Director of DERI at NUI Galway, which was established in 2003 with support from Science Foundation Ireland, says: “This agreement will boost world-class R&D in the field of semantic technologies as it makes possible a closer collaboration between two leading institutions. We were honoured to have been approached by KISTI regarding this agreement and glad to accept, while looking forward to the start of specific research projects.”

Dr Won-Kyung Sung, Head of Information & Software Research Center of KISTI, says: “We expect that this Memorandum of Understanding will advance semantic web technology-based smart information service of KISTI and expand international collaboration in several R&D areas including semantic web.”

Among the first specific projects that are included in the agreement is one related to DERI’s ‘web of data’ search engine Sindice.

“Sindice represents a unique opportunity for researchers and companies to look at and start using infrastructures and concepts related to web-scale semantic data processing”, said Dr Giovanni Tummarello, head of the Data Intensive Infrastructure unit in DERI. “We are receiving more and more interest on this topic from enterprise and academic partners like KISTI”, added Dr Tummarello, “and there are solid prospects for Irish based job creation related to these activities in the near future.”

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