Partners

Karlsruhe Institute of TechnologyKIT is a higher education and research organization with about 8,000 employees, 18,500 students, and a total annual budget of about 700 million €, established in October 2009 as a merger of Universität Karlsruhe (TH) (founded in 1825), one of Germany’s leading research universities, and Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (founded in 1956), one of the largest research centers in the Helmholtz Association. KIT is represented in EUCLID by the Institute AIFB (Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods), considered by many the birth place of semantic technologies in Europe. Approximately 25 researchers of the knowledge management research group work on theoretical foundations and scalable implementations of semantic technologies solutions, closely collaborating with the sister institute KSRI (Karlsruhe Service Research Institute), with the start‐up company ontoprise GmbH, and with the Knowledge Management group at the FZI Research Center for Information Technologies. In the context of Linked Data, KIT offers a comprehensive software pipeline of the Linked Data consumption process, as well as extensive training know‐how from training events such as summer schools, webinars and industry tutorials on topics relevant to the EUCLID curriculum, covering most aspects of the Linked Data consumption process.

 

Ontotext ADOntotext is a leading semantic software developer, offering the OWLIM database and platforms for semantic search, web mining, LINKED DATA MANAGEMENT and manual CONTENT annotation. Ontotext provides professional services for text mining and semantic data integration; it has continuously growing network of partners, resellers and customers.

 

The Open UniversityThe Open University (OU) is the world leader in distance teaching and the largest university in the UK. Since its charter was granted in 1969, it has re-shaped the notion of quality distance learning, evolving to what the OU now calls Supported Open Learning in recognition of the extensive and flexible support offered to its 220,000 currently registered students through a vast human network of 7,400 Associate Lecturers throughout the UK and Europe. Over 180,000 students are now regularly online, using discourse environments to work with their tutors and peers or interacting with increasing amounts of custom-developed primary and support resources via the Web and streaming media.
The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the OU to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU’s very nature. Approximately 70 researchers, technologists and designers work in the fields of the semantic Web and knowledge services, knowledge management, social software, new media systems, narrative hypermedia, and multimedia systems.

 

STI International Research and Consulting GmbHSTI Research and Consultancy’s focus and vision is to ensure that semantics will become part of everyday life. Semantic technology is on the cusp of mainstream adoption and represents a huge potential for advances in all areas of ICT. However the semantics community has traditionally encountered barriers in transferring its knowledge and tools to mainstream enterprises, despite a broad industrial interest in the technology and clear benefits to be gained. STI Research and Consultancy will both pursue its own (i) research and development focused on establishing semantics in key emerging markets, and act as (ii) a mediator for the semantics community to the broader industry stakeholders.

 

Associate partners

Fluid Operations AGFluid Operations AG (fluidOps) is a privately held software company headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, with currently about 45 employees. The company was co-founded in 2008 by Vasu Chandrasekhara, Dr. Andreas Eberhart, Dr. Stefan Kraus and Dr. Ulrich Walther, a team of seasoned IT experts with both profound academic background and – having previously worked as chief developers of the ProLiant Essentials Virtualisation Suite at HP – strong expertise in the industrial sector. With this background, fluidOps has developed a number of patented technologies for Enterprise Cloud Management based on Semantic Technologies. In 2010 it has been named “Gartner Cool Vendor” for its game-changing solutions in the cloud market. Exploiting its expertise at the interface between cloud computing and semantic technologies, fluidOps is developing the Information Workbench, a holistic, cloud-enabled platform for application development on top of Linked Data. The company is a strong supporter of open source projects, making many of its core technologies available to the open source community.

 

University Simón BolívarThe University Simón Bolívar (www.usb.ve) is a public highly ranked institution created in 1967. It is located in the Valle de Sartenejas in Caracas and in the seaside location of Valle de Camurí Grande in Vargas. Research at the USB is conducted in diverse engineering areas, social sciences, and applied and basic sciences.

The Semantic Web Group (www.ldc.usb.ve/SWG) is a multidisciplinary group that integrates people from multiple areas like Databases, Distributed Systems, Medical Image Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Political and Life Sciences. Our research work mainly focuses on the development of tools for effectively and efficiently discovery, retrieving and management Web accessible resources. Particularly, in the context of Linked Data we have developed techniques to integrate data from SPARQL endpoints and adapt query execution schedulers to data availability. We have also used graph summarization and statistical relational models for link prediction and validation. Additionally, data mining techniques and probabilistic logics have provided the basis for predicting voters' electoral behavior and precisely visualizing medical images.

 

Fluid Operations AGThe University of Southampton is one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. The university is truly international, drawing students from over 100 different countries and benefiting from a wide and varied culture. It is ranked in the top ten of research led universities in the UK, and participating in a high number of collaborative research projects and related initiatives.
The academic unit of Electronics and Computer Science (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk) has a distinctive reputation for its research, education, and enterprise in Computer Science, Electronics, and Electrical Engineering. The largest school of its kind in the UK, ECS is internationally regarded for its world- leading and transformative research, and for its ability to define and develop new research directions. Most notably, in the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise, ECS was ranked joint second in the UK for Computer Science (for quality of research). The school has a leading role in developments in the areas of World Wide Web, Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data, including a Web Science Doctoral Training Centre and the prestigious Web and Internet Science research group (WAIS), which will be directly involved in the project. Members of the group have held a pioneering role in the development of the Web as we know it today and are actively contributing to its latest success stories, including the Web of Data, and the Open Data movement which has resulted in the launch of the Open Data Institute (ODI, http://www.theodi.org) in 2012. Our efforts are dedicated not only to theoretical and engineering aspects, but also to the study and understanding of socio-technical systems such as the Web in a broader context, including human-computer interaction, socio-economic implications, social and community building concerns, provenance and cyber-security and policy development. This expertise has led to a wide range of projects and initiatives in the UK public sector, which have released their data according to open and Linked Data principles, with our contributions. We will build upon these positive experiences in EUCLID in order to contribute to the development of a Linked-Data-oriented data science curriculum for practitioners.