New project in Open Web Search launched: SOURCE
The SOURCE research project (launched on April 1, 2026) makes a key contribution to the German federal government’s IT security research as part of the BMFTR research program “Digital.Sicher.Souverän.” (“Digital.Secure.Sovereign.”)
The OpenWebSearch.EU project has ended but the Open Web Search Initiative is now contributing to numerous other research projects. One that launched recently is project SOURCE, which stands for “Skalierbare, offene und umfassende Erkennung von Desinformationskampagnen im Web“ (“Scalable, Open, and Comprehensive Detection of Disinformation Campaigns on the Web”). The project is supported by the BMFTR (German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space) as part of the funding line “Vertrauen in Demokratie und Staat: Digitale Desinformation erkennen und abwehren” (“Trust in Democracy and the State: Detecting and Countering Digital Disinformation”).
The project team comprises old and new faces in the Open Web Search community: the University of Passau, the University of Kassel, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Open Search Foundation and Alliance4Europe (A4E).
The focus of SOURCE is the development of a freely accessible database of potential disinformation artifacts. This involves utilizing web data from the Open Web Index and additional social media crawls, which are then analyzed and interpreted in terms of content and origin using AI tools. The necessary AI, cloud, and storage capacities are provided by a federated digital infrastructure.
The active Open Web Search community, as well as technical and editorial expert communities, are brought on board early for needs assessments. The communities are expected to contribute concrete use cases, which will be used to test, further enrich, and make the database content practical.
The data generated by the project will be made available to both the scientific community and users in the fields of journalism, business, and civil society, thereby creating a solid foundation for identifying and combating disinformation on the web.
The German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) is funding the project with €2,500,000 over a period of three years.
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