Nine Third-Party partners join „OpenWebSearch.eu – EUR 950,000 in funding
New partners from academia and industry collaborate closely with the EU-funded project OpenWebSearch.eu to progress open and free web search guided by European values.
Germany, December 2024 – The OpenWebSearch.eu project sets out to pilot a European Open Web Index (OWI) as foundation for the development of innovative search and AI applications that are grounded in European values. Following open calls in the beginning of 2024, the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium recently onboarded nine Third-Party project partners into their Community Programme. The new partners will develop new search applications on top of the OWI and provide computing power to expand the Open Web Search infrastructure. Each project will receive funding ranging from 50,000 to 150,000 Euro.
OpenWebSearch.eu Community Manager Ursula Gmelch: „Seeing innovative third-party contributors expand the project scope with new ideas, scale up resources and expand the community is a meaningful step forward. We are excited to onboard this set of innovative Third-Party partners.“
Developers Call: Encouraging Innovative Search Applications
Through its second open call the OpenWebSearch.eu project sought proposals for leveraging OWI data in novel use cases or research scenarios. Seven new Third-Party project partners from six European countries – France, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, Austria and Germany – will bring their innovative, mostly AI-driven concepts to life.
Contributing new concepts for the usage of the OWI, these projects set out to:
– enable better search results for specific queries, e.g. in the domain of educational resources, open-source mobile maps search functionalities or custom search for municipalities and councils in the EU
– detect disinformation while enhancing more trustworthy data retrieval
– identify low quality content through AI-based „neural crawling“
– deliver quality knowledge for people with diverse information literacy as well as diverse linguistic backgrounds, thus enhancing inclusion
The selected projects are provided by:
– France based e.foundation, who operate the open source e/OS/ mobile phone operating system
– Italian DEXAI Artificial Ethics, who focus on multi-lingual approaches in search result verification
– Wizenose, a Netherlands-based company offering solutions for trustworthy educational online resources
– SPINQUE, a Netherlands-based company offering better search solutions for municipalities and councils in the EU
– The University of Groningen, who combat disinformation by providing knowledge graphs through retrieval of diverse perspectives and argument search
– Researchers from the University of Pisa and the University of Glasgow, who focus on improving search quality
– Know-Center, an Austrian company providing accessibility in the health domain
Data Centres Call: Securing the Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure
Following the third open call for data centres, two new data centres will join the OpenWebSearch.eu network of computing infrastructure providers: France based company Exaion as well as the University of Oldenburg in Germany will be hosting parts of the Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure (OWSAI).
Prof. Michael Granitzer, the project“s principal investigator from University of Passau: „Providing significant computing power to crawl billions of web pages to build and store an Open Web Index is the biggest bottleneck. With the datacentres of the University of Oldenburg and Exaion joining the Open Web Search Community, we can provide a proof of concept to demonstrate that the OWI and its infrastructure can be efficiently scaled with additional computing power.“
The OpenWebSearch.eu project has the goal to crawl and index the entire text-based internet on a regular basis. One of the major challenges of providing an Open Web Index and an Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure is to operate with huge amounts of data. This task is currently performed by the five data centres CERN, LRZ, IT4I, DLR and CSC that are founding partners in the project. In the long run, data storage will be spread over more shoulders and more data centres will join the Open Web Search Community.
About OpenWebSearch.eu:
OpenWebSearch.EU is the first project funded by the European Union that aims to enable independent web search and thus free, unbiased and transparent access to information.
14 renowned European research organizations – including Open Search Foundation – gave the starting signal for the collaboration in September 2022. Over a period of three years, the researchers develop the core of a European Open Web Index. Under grant agreement no. 101070014, the project is being funded with 8.5 million Euro from the European Union“s Horizon research and innovation programme under the NGI – Next Generation Internet initiative.
About Horizon Europe:
Horizon Europe is the EU“s key funding programme for research and innovation. It aims to build a knowledge- and innovation-based society and a competitive economy while contributing to sustainable development. The programme aims at implementing the European Commission“s guidelines.
Contact
Open Search Foundation e.V.
Christine Plote
Schorn 6
82319 Starnberg
Phone: +49 178 60 149 10
E-Mail: 
Url: https://openwebsearch.eu
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