“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.

Read more

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.

The Open Search Foundation is Calling for #FreeWebSearch Day

“The #FreeWebSearch Day on 29 September reminds us that open access to online resources is a key factor for freedom of information and democracy. It draws attention to this issue worldwide and bundles participatory actions and invites especially the Open Web Search Community to take action” says Christine Plote, co-fouder and member of the board of the non-profit Open Search Foundation.

The Open Search Foundation (OSF) from Starnberg (Germany), a project partner of openwebsearch.eu, is calling for #FreeWebSearch Day on 29 September. On this day, contributions from as many different groups as possible are welcome: Companies, schools, universities, other educational institutions, museums or associations can contribute to open online search with (online) lectures, discussions, participatory activities or projects. IT specialists or programmers can contribute with technical know-how and organise hackathons to work on an open web index to catalogue web content.

The Open Search Foundation has set up a website for this international action day and, together with partners, invites people to advocate a free web.

website: freewebsearch.org

“Eine Suchmaschine für Europa” | ORF

Austrian broadcaster ORF reported in his radio program „Ö1 Digital.Leben“on our European OpenWebSearch.eu initiative and the EU project and called the movement “Search Engine Rebels”. The two interviewed are Alexander Nussbaumer from TU Graz and Stefan Voigt from Open Search Foundation/DLR.

Here is the radio piece (German):
https://sound.orf.at/collection/1170/34867/eine-suchmaschine-fur-europa

Opinion paper: Impact and development of an Open Web Index for Open Web Search | JASIST

A quick read yet thorough overview of the possibilities, technical aspects and principles of an Open Web Index

The OpenWebSearch.Eu consortium published an opinion paper on “The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)” about the impact and development of an Open Web Index. The 23-strong author team explains the challenges and outlines six basic principles for developing and maintaining an open web index, based on the principles of open data, legal compliance and collaborative technology development.

 

Read the full paper here:
https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24818

Get the full paper as pdf:
https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/asi.24818