The next partner we are introducing is IT4Innovations National Supercomputing center. IT4Innovations is a university research institute of VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, providing technical support and supercomputing power for the Open Web Index. The research team is guided and supported by the managing director of IT4Innovations, Vít Vondrák. The team includes Jan Martinovič, head of the Advanced Data Analysis and Simulations Lab, Kateřina Slaninová, deputy head of the Advanced Data Analysis and Simulations Lab, Martin Golasowski, senior researcher, and Markéta Dobiašová, research outreach and exploitation specialist. The IT4Innovations team has two main functions, it contributes to the infrastructure work-package and actively participates in dissemination and communication of the OpenWebSearch.eu project.

Martin Golasowski is leading technical activities related to establishing a federated data infrastructure, and Kateřina Slaninová is the task leader of the dissemination activities. We asked them about crucial milestones for the last project period and beyond.

Please describe your organisation’s tasks in the project. What is your field of expertise that you bring to the project?

Martin: Within the OpenWebSearch.eu project I focus mainly on creating tools allowing efficient data processing, movement and publishing on major infrastructure providers across Europe. We have been able to establish a distributed data infrastructure, and our tools are used to orchestrate complex computing workflows across the connected data and computing infrastructure. Here we use our expertise in data processing and analysis on HPC infrastructure to enable its efficient usage for web data processing and index generation. Our contribution has been important for this project as it helps to build basic infrastructure for building a transparent Open Web Index which can be easily extended by new infrastructure providers.

Kateřina: As the dissemination task leader, IT4Innovations has been responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing project dissemination activities, mainly the actions aimed at spreading project results to relevant stakeholders (researchers, policymakers, industry, or SMEs).

How is the project progressing? Which major milestones did you achieve?

Martin: During the project, we were able to leverage European computing centres for web data processing and publishing, such as IT4Innovations in the Czech Republic, LRZ in Germany, and CSC in Finland. Our tooling based on the LEXIS Platform allowed the project to efficiently utilise these powerful infrastructures and provide access to the project data products for general public through a web interface.

Kateřina: The project is progressing very well. One of our most significant achievements was the successful dissemination of the European Open Web Index (OWI), the first federated, pan‑European web index designed to support fair, transparent, and unbiased web search. The index is now publicly available for research and development use.

What are the challenges you have been facing?

Martin: Establishing a common data and computing infrastructure across providers located in different countries always means dealing with specific technical and policy challenges. We have been able to achieve our goals thanks to fruitful collaboration with the individual computing centres and their teams.

Kateřina: Open Web Search team provides a complex, large‑scale technical system involving crawling, data processing, and indexing on a distributed computing infrastructure. Translating these technical milestones into messages understandable to general stakeholders takes ongoing effort. Also, aligning communication across 14 diverse partner institutions is challenging. With many partners from universities, supercomputing centres and research institutions coordination requires consistent messaging and clear dissemination workflows.

Which milestones do you plan to achieve in the remaining months?

Martin: Towards the end of the project, we are focusing on contribution to the final deliverables and transition to the sustainability phase, which includes preparation of the infrastructure for operation after the end of the project and contribution to its documentation, which will be publicly available.

Kateřina: We aimed to increase engagement with researchers, developers, and innovators to encourage them to use the public OWI datasets. In the last year of the project, we organised and joined various events where we promoted the OWI, namely ISC High Performance 2025, NGI Forum 2025, #OSSYM 2025, EBDVF 2025, a parliamentarian breakfast, and lately we promoted the OWI at SCA/HPCAsia 2026.

What makes the OWS project special to you?

Martin: The project is a unique undertaking aiming to provide a transparent way to access indexed data from the public web. We were able to contribute thanks to our extensive experience with high-performance computing infrastructure and technologies like iRODS, the LEXIS Platform and our collaboration with European initiatives like EUDAT. Being a part of this project has also given us an opportunity to validate our tools in this specific domain of large-scale web data processing.

Kateřina: For me, what makes OpenWebSearch.eu truly special is its mission: restoring open, unbiased, transparent access to information in Europe, and reducing dependence on large global tech companies that control search infrastructure. The project’s collaborative nature creates a unique community working towards a shared vision of a more democratic web. It is the first EU‑funded initiative to build a public web index that anyone can reuse – researchers, innovators, SMEs, and even future search engine developers. This aligns with strong European values: openness, ethics, legal clarity, and digital sovereignty.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Kateřina: IT4Innovations will organise its future exploitation activities into the programme that covers follow‑up European projects, cooperation with the public sector, service deployment, and growth of its federated ecosystem. It will work with the Czech EOSC initiative on aligned services and training activities, prepare and implement Horizon Europe continuation projects, and continue pilots with public authorities, focused on citizen‑oriented and web‑intelligence services. The Czech national supercomputing centre will also contribute together with CSC to sovereign AI services using Open Web Data in the LUMI AI Factory, and create reusable workflow templates for public‑sector, industrial, SME, and startup use cases.

Thank you for the interview!

Read more about IT4I: https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/vsb-technical-university-of-ostrava-it4innovations/

The Open Search Foundation e.V. is a European non-profit initiative dedicated to enabling independent, transparent, and democratic access to online information. Working in collaboration with research institutions, data centres, and other partners, the foundation promotes open web search as a public good. Its core activities include advancing search engine research, fostering cooperation, and supporting education in the field.

Dr. Stefan Voigt is Chairman and CEO of the Open Search Foundation e.V. and Coordinator of the OpenSearch@DLR project. Together with his team (Ursula Gmelch, Community Manager and Katrin Wellenberg, Science Communications Manager), he leads efforts to develop open infrastructures, such as the Open Web Index. These initiatives aim to promote innovation, support European digital sovereignty, and advance ethical and reliable search systems and AI applications.

Please describe your organization’s tasks in the project. What is your field of expertise that you bring to the project?

Stefan: The Open Search Foundation has a networking, communication, and coordination role. We coordinate the work package on dissemination, exploitation, and communication (DEC), as well as the community building and outreach tasks. All in all, we network across different disciplines and bring the community together.

How is the project progressing? Which major milestones did you achieve?

Stefan: We think that the Open Web Search Project is processing very well. All the major technical and organizational goals and milestones were met. Together with our partners, we managed to bring together a large community of supporters and contributors, including computing centers, SMEs, and other organizations that use the Web Index and support the building and growing of the use of web data. The major milestone was the launch of the pilot Web index that the technical partners contributed to a lot. At the same time, we managed to engage several hundred people interested in this infrastructure and how it can be used.

What are the challenges you have been facing (regarding your tasks)?

Stefan: The biggest challenge that we faced from the beginning of this project was that this idea of a federated open web search infrastructure is not known and not yet well understood by many people, all the way from the layman on the street up to the policymakers. This means the challenge was to have people understand that not only a big hyperscaler from the US can build search engines and the underlying web index, but that it’s also possible to do this in a cooperative and federated manner across European computing centers and to have people cooperate and actually build such a web search ecosystem.

Which milestones do you plan to achieve in the remaining months?

Stefan: Since we’ve already reached the nominal end-of-project time and we’re currently in a six month extension phase. As said before, all major tech and non-tech milestones have already been reached. Now we use the remaining project time to further spread the word, wrap-up the developments, and get the idea transported towards policy- and decision makers at European Member State, European Commission, and Parliament level, so the idea can really make it to the awareness of the relevant people. In this way, it has a chance to be taken further, grown, and operationally implemented in Europe.

What makes the OWS project special to you?

Stefan: The OpenWebSearch.eu project is the backbone project of the European OpenSearch initiative. The OpenSearchFoundation has been working for many years to inspire such a project in Europe – a project that’s very close to the DNA of the OpenSearchFoundation and is actually the core of what we always wanted to achieve and what we will try to work on future.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Stefan: Yes, of course. The project was an important means to get the idea of a federated web data infrastructure and open web search piloted and to demonstrate that it works. Now we have to take it to scale and make sure it gets further funding in European member states as well as from European funding sources, to further grow and scale the infrastructure and its uptake. This is what we will be working on in the coming months and years to help strengthen European digital sovereignty.

Thank you for the interview!

Read more about the Open Search Foundation: Open Search Foundation e.V.

Continuing our partner portrait series, today’s spotlight is set on Radboud University in the Netherlands. Prof.dr.ir. Arjen P. de Vries and Prof.dr.ir. Djoerd Hiemstra lead the Information Retrieval research group at Radboud University, part of the Data Science section in the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences.

In OpenWebSearch.EU, the team, which is complemented by PHD candidates Gijs Hendriksen and Daria Alexander, have been developing a new architecture for search engines with many parts of the system being decentralized. The key idea is to separate index construction from the search engines themselves, where the most expensive step to create index shards can be carried out on large clusters while the search engine itself can be operated locally.

Another vision includes an Open-Web-Search Engine Hub, where companies and individuals can share their specifications of search engines and pre-computed, regularly updated search indices.

Having recently launched the OpenWebIndex pilot, we asked Arjen and Gijs about some key results and learnings thus far while also touching on some next steps for the remaining project time.
    

Gijs and Arjen, thank you both for your time today. Please could you describe Radboud University’s tasks in the OpenWebSearch.eu project? What is the field of expertise that your bring to the project?

Arjen: The Radboud University expertise is Information Retrieval, which is the core field of computer science that contributes to the development of search engines. The central question is how computers can establish the relevance of information objects for people’s information needs. We look into a wide range of open questions in the field, covering topics including the mathematical modeling of information (with and without new AI techniques), scalable and resource efficient system architectures, and, perhaps the most difficult one, how to measure the quality of retrieval systems and compare different approaches on their effectiveness.

Sounds like an ongoing tedious process. Have you found any key learnings for what works and what doesn’t in combining or comparing the various approaches?

Gijs: There were many learnings along the way indeed. Without going into too much detail, some of our key learnings are published as research papers and OWS deliverables.

How is the project progressing overall? Which major milestones are you proud of thus far?

Gijs: From our point of view, the project is progressing very well! After 2.5 years of engineering we are now running daily workflows that produce daily index shards from crawled content across three European data centers. Now that we are getting the data out there, we can focus on improving the ease of access to these index shards.

Could you elaborate on that a bit more?

Gijs: Sure. We are now working on improving access to the Open Web Index. A main part of that is deciding how we want to ‘shard’ the data, i.e. how we want to distribute the data across logical partitions that can be used to efficiently query a part of the data. Currently, we split the index into language-based shards, but we want to experiment with topic-based shards and even create shards based on frequent access patterns.
We are also actively investigating how we can best integrate shards over time. We are currently producing daily index shards, but have yet to decide how we can best combine these daily subsets, and how we should deal with document updates and deletions. Finally, we recognize that many people want to be able to query our index directly without having to download all our index data. We are working on a way in which we offer direct querying capabilities over an inverted file hosted in a data lake. This should also enable us to efficiently propagate updates to the index.

Sounds promising. What are some of the challenges you are facing?

Arjen: The main technical challenges stem directly from the scale of the Web, and the noisiness of Web data. The really big problem remains however that of evaluation. How do you establish the value of innovations in search without continuously running costly user studies? We are looking into mixing ideas from what is known in our field as ‘the Cranfield tradition’, with new developments in LLMs, and user-oriented studies to fill in where machines would fail.

What makes the OWS project special?

Arjen: EU projects are often a way for partner organisations to fund their own interests, resulting in internal project frictions (large or small) about the direction and final objectives. With OpenWebSearch.eu it is nothing like that. Everyone on the team is highly motivated to make a lasting change in the distribution of online powers, and such a broadly shared target is so refreshing!
We are enjoying it thoroughly to take part in this enterprise, and we are convinced that OpenWebSearch.eu will produce a lasting impact, sustainable beyond the duration of the project.

Do you already have plans for the time after the project ends?

Arjen: The brief answer is ‘Keep going’. Hopefully we manage to keep the team together, and find funding to even expand by integrating parties that have started to contribute actively to the Open Web Search and Analysis Infrastructure. And we will work hard to make the index a fundamental building block, suitable for others to do Web search research.

Thank you for the insights!

Read more about Radboud University: https://openwebsearch.eu/partners/radboud-university/