Update from OWS.EU partner projects: Part 2
The OWS.EU Community Programme is an essential part of our work towards a European Open Web Search. The programme helps us to integrate new third-party project teams into the OWS.EU landscape and future R&D activities.
In November 2023 we successfully onboarded six new partner projects looking into technical, legal and economic research topics in support of a European Open Web Index. The projects were selected via our first Third-party call. Information on successful projects selected from our second and third open call will follow soon. This blogpost provides an update from two of the more technical projects from call #1 – LAW4OSAI and Open Console.
LAW4OSAI: License-Aware Web Crawling for Open Search AI
The LAW4OSAI (License-Aware Web Crawling for Open Search AI) project deals with legal and technical aspects of content crawling and aims to enable license-aware crawling of web content by automatically identifying and retrieving content licenses. The team successfully developed a browser plugin to annotate a dataset for the detection of content licenses on websites and open sourced the code (https://github.com/LAW4OSAI/plugin-license-annotation). Furthermore, an algorithm to detect standard open licenses (like Common Creative licenses) on websites was created and the annotation of a dataset has started. The size of the dataset will increase in the remaining time of the project.
Currently the LAW4OSAI team calls for contributions to an online workshop series for researchers and practitioners that are interested in legal aspects of generative AI (https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/law4osai/workshop/).
More information about the LAW4OSAI project
Open Console: Improving Knowledge about Websites
The Open Console project is implemented by Markov Solutions – a freelance business run by Mark Overmeer and Thao Phuong Nguyen. The goal of the project is to build an infrastructure (called Open Console) to share information about websites and thereby improve the availability and quality of produced knowledge.
In the current version of the Open Console, people can already create an account and log in to the console. They are able to generate their personal identities (to define different roles), as well as group identities (for cooperation or association). From that, ownership of websites (or email, or domain name) can be verified.
In the remaining project lifetime, the Open Console team works on implementing other types of ownership proof and making the website production ready. Together with the OWS.EU partners University of Passau and SUMA-eV, the first service provided by Open Console will be implemented. This will be a learning path for the Open Web Index logging requirements and the design of the OC-third party interface specification.
