PRELIDA underway with first meeting in Italy
Wed, 29 May 2013 17:00:00 BST
University of Huddersfield the sole UK representative
Now a University of Huddersfield professor is to play a key role in an EU-funded project which seeks to ensure that the open data revolution stays on track.
Grigoris Antoniou (pictured left), who is Professor of Informatics and an authority on web semantics and artificial intelligence, is participating in PRELIDA (Preserving Linked Data), which is being funded to the tune of 800,000 Euros by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme. A consortium of five universities and institutes has been formed, with Huddersfield being the sole UK representative.
The principal aim of PRELIDA is to devise a “roadmap” for achieving the long-term preservation of linked open data and Professor Antoniou will play a central part in this.
University of Innsbruck, the Vienna-based Semantic Technology Institute International, the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche- Institute of Information Science and Technologies, plus EUROPEANA, the European digital library and the European Alliance for Permanent Access.
“We are not going to address issues like operating systems or the format in which we store information. We assume that this is lower-level infrastructure that will continue to support what is published on the internet,” explained Professor Antoniou.
“We are more concerned about authenticity – about information going missing or information that is no longer linked to other information on the web so that in a sense it becomes isolated and obsolete.
“It is a question of versioning,” continued Professor Antoniou, “on the one hand, how can past information be erased and on the other hand, under what circumstances do we keep earlier versions of information?”
Underway in June
Government data, environmental data, news, library and archive content are among the large amounts of information that are increasingly being made freely available. For example, the UK Government has launched www.data.gov.uk, which currently makes 9,000 datasets available, from all central government departments and a number of other public sector bodies. Such developments are leading to the development of a new, data-driven economy.
PRELIDA was underway at the start of 2013 and in June its experts assemble in Pisa for a first technical meeting.
The project will run for two years and it is anticipated that it will exert lasting influence on scientific and technological development in the area of linked open data, with Professor Antoniou and his University of Huddersfield colleagues leading the effort to develop the roadmap that is essential to success.
Print This Page