The Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway has announced a three-year Enterprise of the Future technology project, supported by Cisco.
The €400,000 project will develop new ways for the Enterprise of the Future to integrate information and make it easily accessible for employees.
A typical company has information stored across a variety of often unconnected formats including documents, emails, instant messaging, and wiki pages. DERI’s semantic search and integration technology will seek to more cleverly and usefully link information and make it accessible across the company.
“This joint project shows that the leadership of Irish based research is recognised and valued by companies such as Cisco,” DERI director Professor Stefan Decker said yesterday. “The results originating from research projects like these could help to secure existing employment and create new jobs in Ireland by providing us with a competitive edge.”
“It is one thing having information, but another challenge entirely on how to integrate that information so that is easily linked, accessible, and useful,” added Mike Conroy, general manager of Cisco R&D in Ireland.
Cisco’s decision to support the project follows a recent visit by Cisco’s vice president of research, Dave Rossetti, to Galway. DERI and Cisco proposed that new semantic web technologies could help companies make better use of the torrent of information — from email to documents — which employees have to process every day.
“Cisco believes that DERI, as a world leader in semantic web research, can now link enterprise social networking, social connectivity, and unified communications for the benefit of companies of the future,” said Keith Griffin the Cisco lead architect who developed the project with DERI.
The Enterprise of the Future project is also supported by the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology. The project builds on the existing ongoing Science Foundation Ireland sponsored research projects between Cisco and DERI.
