„It takes plenty of little Davids“ I Agoratalk

The OpenWebSearch.eu project was mentioned in a recent Agoratalk podcast episode featuring Christine Plote – Chairwoman at the Open Search Foundation which is one of the fourteen OWS.EU consortium entities.

The title of the episode was “Ethics in the digital space. Alternatives instead of regulation on the net”. Together with podcast hosts Daniel Höche and Olivier Blanchard, Christine discussed the current digital landscape including ethical and societal challenges. The conversation also dove into the rather monopolistic search engine market that capitalizes on private data and shapes filter bubbles with huge, yet often invisible societal consequences.

Christine Plote shared insights on the motivation behind OWS.EU, explaining why it takes many “small Davids“ to build true alternatives to the established commerce-driven web search giants.

To listen to the full interview (in German language) click on the link below:

#ossym24 – Call for papers for 6th International Symposium on Open Search

6th International Symposium on Open Search #ossym24: Call for papers and demos is open until 23 March

In October 2024, the Open Search community will gather at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich for the 6th International Open Search Symposium. Papers on research and best practice projects can be submitted until 22 March 2024. For the sixth time, #ossym will provide a forum to discuss and further develop ideas and concepts of open internet search.

Organized by ows.eu project partners Open Search Foundation and hosted at LRZ, the International Open Search Symposium will  take place as a hybrid conference from 9 to 11 October 2024.

The call for papers and demos is aimed at a wide range of experts – invited are, among others, researchers and speakers from research and informatics, data centres, libraries, technology companies, politics, education as well as legal, ethical and societal thought leaders.

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New Calls for Third-party Proposals and new Funding Round to be Launched in February 2024

OpenWebSearch.eu to launch open calls #2 and #3 soon, offering funding and onboarding to third-parties

After Call #1 in March 2023 and the resulting successful onboarding of six third-party partners in November 2023, the OpenWebSearch.EU will call for proposals again in February: Calls #2 and #3 will invite researchers, innovators and data centres to submit their applications to participate in the Open Web Search mission and receive funding for their project ideas. The calls will launch in February, applications will be accepted until April 2024.

ows.eu Call #2:
Applications of an Open Web Index

Call #2 will particularly ask for proposals for applications of the Open Web Index. The Open WebSearch.eu project will provide access to pre-processed and indexed data in the terabyte range. Also it will deliver continuous, daily updates until the end of the project. Successful applicants should use and exploit the data provided in innovative applications scenarios or research topics.

Under this call, applicants will be able to apply for funding of between EUR 50,000.00 and EUR 100,000.00 for a funding period of up to 12 months.

ows.eu Call #3:
Onboarding of Data Centres

Call #3 will address computing and data centers to join the OpenWebSearch.eu network of infrastructure organisations and hosting parts of the OWSAI infrastructure. The ows.eu consortium aims to on-board data centers as a proof-of-concept for the developed technology and engage in discussions on creating a sustainable future infrastructure. Called will be universities, public infrastructure providers, data centres, companies (e.g., cloud providers) or research teams with a well established infrastructure. Applicants should be capable of providing a significant extension to the current OpenWebSearch.eu data and compute infrastructure, and engaging in relevant infrastructure-oriented R&D activities.

Under call#3, applicants can request funding between 100.000,00 and 150.000,00 EUR for a funding period of up to 12 months. Major cost categories can include infrastructure costs, other costs and human resources.

 

More information on the calls and the call application packages will be launched in February 2024 on the third-party call landingpage.

The open calls are part of the OpenWebSearch.eu community programme, aiming to integrating new third-party project teams into the OpenWebSearch.eu landscape and future activities for sustainable Research and Development. Therefore, the candidate third-party projects should probe the closely related topics addressed in the project and should aim at widening and enriching the existing R&D activities as well as suggesting new ones which are complementary to the project goals and aims. Ideally, the project results should be integrated with the OpenWebSearch.eu infrastructure.

“Towards an unbiased digital world“ I CERN Courier

“We don’t want to copy what others are doing.“ – Interview with Andreas Wagner of ows.eu project partner CERN

2024 marks the second year for the EU funded project OpenWebSearch.eu – a project that aims to develop and create a European Open Web Index to ensure European sovereignty in the digital arena. Among the 14 project partners is CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. Andreas Wagner of the CERN IT Department and responsible for the OWS.EU project lead within CERN, was interviewed about the ambitious project in CERN Courier – the renowned monthly magazine for high-energy physics.

In the interview he shares about the collaborative approach of the project in building a foundation for less biased, transparent and open access to information in the digital world. Read about the current status of the project, including first crawling activities, as well as an outlook on how the project could move ahead with regard to aspects such as funding, navigating through legal frameworks and establishing ethical rules of conduct and curation.

Read the article online at CERN Courier

Who, what, why and when – Compiled answers to frequently asked questions are now available on our website

❓What is an Open Web Index (OWI)?
❓Are search engines and web search still relevant given the growing influence of AI technology?
❓How will I as a developer or company be able to use an Open Web Index?

Those are just some of the questions that come up a lot when people first hear about the OpenWebSearch.eu project – our  3 year long research project, funded by the EU commission with their EU Horizon Europe research framework programme.

To answer some of the questions that arise a lot, the ows.eu team has launched an FAQ page. Find out about who is behind OpenWebSearch.eu and which problems the project aims to solve as well as how a long term funding of an Open Web Index could potentially look like. Stay curious and dive right in!

Go to FAQ page

And for those that would like to get involved, we recommend checking out our Community page: https://openwebsearch.eu/community/

 

“Ethical, open and non-commercial: the Open Web Search project is designed to provide Europe with the right alternative to existing search engines” | CERN news

Our project partner CERN featured OWS.EU in their news section. Very readworthy article about the Open Web Search project and its goal of securing Europe’s contributing to Europe’s digital sovereignty as well as promoting an open human-centered search engine market.

“Together with the other partners, we have started by simply discussing possible ways of building a new neutral indexing system,” explains ows.eu team member Andreas Wagner from CERN. “Although the system is still very preliminary, running the it on our own set of webpages at CERN has proved useful as it has allowed us to learn critical things about our own internal search engine. In other words, the project will also help CERN to improve its own search capabilities and will provide an open science search function across CERN’s multiple information repositories.”

Read the full article on the CERN news section

Common Goals with Common Crawl

OWS.EU constantly thrives to move forward with more transparent, self-determined web search. With the aim to build a Europe-based Open Web Index, choosing trustworthy, powerful crawling partners is key. Common Crawl is one such dedicated and renowned partner. It is therefore an honor to be featured on their website in the official partners section.

“Common Crawl is not only a major resource for web-innovations, but also an inspiring partner. We are particularly looking forward to co-operating on license-aware crawling and to integrate their crawls into our open web index,“ says Michael Granitzer, OWS.EU’s principal investigator.

The Common Crawl Foundation is an NGO that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Its mission: to democratize Open Web Search, “enabling free access to web crawl data encourages collaboration and interdisciplinary research, as organizations, academia, and non-profits can work together to address complex challenges.” The non-profit has significantly expanded its core team throughout the last two years and is continually growing.

We are proud to be an early partner, sharing a similar vision.

“Meet the StormCrawler users: Q&A with the OpenWebSearch.eu project” | Digital Pebbles

Interview on StormCrawler blog for an interview with Michael Dinzinger and Saber Zerhoudi, both researchers in the ows.eu project.

Learn about their research at the Uni Passau, about resource-efficient crawling and how they build crawling pipelines for an open web index – and why the heterogeneous infrastructure of the project is a major challenge in their work.

Read the interview here:
https://digitalpebble.blogspot.com/2023/11/meet-stormcrawler-users-q-with-open-web.html

 

ows.eu Consortium meeting at IT4 in Ostrava

The third OWS.EU consortium meeting took place in Ostrava, Czech Republic. For three consecutive days the 14 partners of OpenWebSearch.eu reunited  at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center (a big Děkujeme!) to discuss updates across all working packages and create a new agenda for the year to come.

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Third-Party Partners Successfully Onboarded into OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme

Six third-party funding partners have joined the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme with projects surrounding technical, legal and economic expertise.

On October 27th 2023, OpenWebSearch.eu successfully onboarded six Third Parties who were selected subsequent to its first Open Call (announced in March 2023) for the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme in 2023. The selected partners were picked from 21 submissions with the goal to extend and enrich existing R&D activities that are relevant to the project in reaching key targets.

The call demanded contributions in form of research studies on legal or economic aspects of Open Search (Track 1) as well as on concepts for legally compliant data acquisition, processing, considering also societal constraints (Track 2).

Third-party projects should explore closely related topics of the project. They should aim to extend and enrich the existing R&D activities and propose new ones that complement the project objectives. The calls especially targeted smaller companies (i.e., SMEs, start-ups), individual innovators, individual researchers or research teams (e.g., doctoral or post-doctoral researchers).

The selected third-party projects are funded under the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Program. They receive partial fundings for their project contributions ranging between 25.000 and 120.000 Euros each.

OpenWebSearch.eu introduces the 6 Third-Party Projects:

MRC
„Market Potential Assessment for OpenWebSearch.eu: Quantifying benefits and costs of scaling EU web search“.
Provided by Mücke Roth & Company GmbH (Germany)
Click here for the partner profile.

LISA
„A Legal Framework for the development and Operation of an Open Web Search Index (Legal, Intellectual Property and Cyber-Security Aspects)“.
Provided by Prof. Dr. Matthias Wendland from Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Germany)
Click here for the partner profile.

OPEN CONSOLE
„Open Console Implementation“.
Provided by Mark Overmeer and Thao Phuong Nguyen from MARKOV Solutions (The Netherlands)
Click here for the partner profile.

LOREN
„Legal Open European Web Index“.
Provided by Paul C. Johannes and Dr. Maxi Nebel (Germany)
Click here for the partner profile.

ALMASTIC
„Assessing Legal Risks and Mitigating Challenges in Open Web Indexes“.
Provided by Prof. Dr. Kai Erenli from BFI Vienna (Austria)
Click here for the partner profile.

LAW4OSAI
„License-Aware Web Crawling for Open Search AI“.
Provided by Dr. Daniel Braun – University of Twente (The Netherlands), Dr. Bernhard Waltl – Liquid Legal Institute (Germany) and Balthasar Cevc – Fingolex (Germany)
Click here for the partner profile.

More Open Calls to follow

The next call for proposals will follow in the first quarter of 2024. To stay up to date regarding proceedings as well as to stay on top of the next Open Call, interested parties from research and business can follow OpenWebSearch.eu on the Socials (LinkedIn, Mastodon, Twitter/X), join the community Channel on MatterMost and regularly check our website: https://openwebsearch.eu/community

 

OpenWebSearch.eu is funded by the EC under GA 101070014.