On September 1st this year the LOD2 project enlargement officially started, bringing five new partners into the LOD2 consortium and enhancing the LOD2 project by their additional unique expertise.
The new members of the consortium – consisting of research organizations and business enterprises – include two academic partners, the University of Economics in Prague (Czech Republic) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Korea), two applied research institutes, the Poznan-based Business Information Systems Institute (Poland) and the Mihajlo Pupin Institute in Belgrade (Serbia), and the IT start-up company Zemanta located in Ljubljana (Slovenia).
Applied under the FP7 ICT work program during the first project year of LOD2, the extension was particularly well-received by the Commission for its high-quality design and clear-cut ideas to round up the research and technical developments planned in LOD2. For instance, with the particular set-up of new partners, one of the objectives is to truly internationalize existing RTD (e.g. for non-Latin-based, Eastern European and Asian languages) so as to achieve a wider applicability of the LOD2 research and development results. Another aim is to substantially enforce LOD2’s Open Government Data use case by extending the coverage to four additional countries and adding a complementary use case focusing on realizing a market for public procurement based on Linked Data. The partners selected for enlarging the LOD2 consortium are committed and well-qualified to successfully realize and integrate these extensions into the technical and methodological LOD2 framework.
The extension allows not only to continue important tasks and implement new activities with more staff effort for the next 36 months, but also increases the project’s EU funding to 7.2 M€ – up from its current 6.4 M€.
Further information on the LOD2 enlargement can also be found at these sites:
