Project Goals#
The project aims to develop and pilot the core for a European Open Web Index (OWI) and the foundation of an open and extensible European Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure (OWSAI). The OWSAI should demonstrate, how search applications and web-based AI data products can be realized through cooperative crawling, analysis, storing and indexing of web content on High-Performance-Computing (HPC) Infrastructure. The project aims to demonstrate the feasibility and potential of an open European web index and how it stimulates a competitive web search and web data product market.
Objectives#
We aim to realize four main objectives:
Objective 1: Creating a core suite of search, discovery and data analytics services to create, maintain and utilize the OWI including a. An Open-Web-Search Engine Hub (OWSE-Hub) for creating, sharing and deploying special purpose, long-tail search engines based on a descriptive search engine specification. b. A distributed OWI with federated search capabilities over distributed indices as backbone for the OWSE-Hub. c. New usage and interaction scenarios / search paradigms for users in the long tail. d. New semantic enrichment models considering information quality and ethical dimensions like content bias.
Objective 2: Develop sensible search engine verticals as demonstrators and for bootstrapping a new search engine and web-data product market. a. Open Science Search will focus on searching scientific resources crawled from the web and utilize new search paradigms like argumenation search. b. Mobile privacy-preserving, personalized recommendation of geo-entities will focus on searching relevant entities in a geographic region. c. We will issue third party calls towards outstanding innovators, researchers and business asking for at least three more verticals. d. New search paradigms, particularly conversational search, temporal argumentation search and human-centric search e. We will enable access to web-data for creating special-purpose Knowledge Representation Models, particularly Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models.
Objective 3: Establishing a network of European HPC-infrastructure, research and business organisations for jointly piloting the OWSAI which adheres to Europe’s values, principles, legislation, ethics and standards. In parallel to the technical challenges, at the same time the ethical, legal and societal aspects (ELSA) of open web search will be addressed.
Objective 4: Stimulating an Ecosystem around the Open Web Index (OWI) which consists of innovators, researchers, computing centres, policy and decision makers and developers.