Research*EU Magazine | Number 11 (April 2012)

Through the looking glass: search engines, data and the semantic adventure

Summary:

Connections, entanglements, networks and webs — these are key to our understanding of the modern world. And it is clear that, whether we are talking about European cooperation or global communications, these links cross the boundaries of countries and nationalities.

This issue of Research*EU magazine looks at two aspects of these connections: a feature on research cooperation in the Balkans and the rest of South-eastern Europe includes an interview on historical links in the region, while a second feature on the semantic web and search technologies covers different aspects of the challenge of making sense of the growing amounts of data and processing power accessible via the Internet.

In our interview, Professor Roumen Daskalov explains his project to re-examine the history of South-eastern Europe from the point of view of connections, rather than isolated national stories. He says, ‘there is some positive and integrative value in showing how “entangled” the histories of the present-day Balkan nations and states were and still are.’ In the modern day, links between countries in the region are growing in importance.

Other featured articles on this topic cover projects on: alternative energy for the Western Balkans, helping the Balkans study climate and environment, and upgrading Western Balkan research in cellular biology.

The ‘IT and telecommunications’ section comprises a feature entitled ‘Through the looking glass: search engines, data and the semantic adventure’. The articles focus on different aspects of the growth in data and devices connected to the web: from saving ecosystems with open data and e-infrastructures to services and linked data that feed the Future Internet.

Contents:

Digital Economy

Health

Industrial Technologies

Climate Change and Environment

Energy

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