An internet technology developed at NUI Galway is to be used by President Obama’s administration in its new website devoted to the $800 billion economic stimulus package.
The administration’s Recovery.gov site will employ a web standard, created at NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI ), to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the US Government.
Researchers at DERI focus on the Semantic Web, which is the next incarnation of the internet which will be more intuitive because data will be defined and linked.
One of the outputs of DERI’s research is called Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, or SIOC. Aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions, SIOC is set to be utilised by Recovery.gov
Creator of SIOC and lecturer in Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway Dr John Breslin, said the possibilities afforded by deploying semantic technologies such as SIOC for government transparency are very exciting. Semantic technology allows the linking of government funding data, fed in from spreadsheets or forms, to contributions from the public, private organisations or the government themselves.
“This can be done not just within a single site but with external linked data from other public sources. You could imagine using this to discover the effect of how and where tax dollars and euros are being spent on statistics for crime, education or innovation in a set of geographic regions.”
As announced by George Thomas, Chief Architect with the US General Services Administration, the Recovery.gov effort will bring transparency to the government towards allowing citizens and activists to access semantic data about everything from contracts and schedules to training and infrastructure costs.
Since 2003, DERI has been supported by Science Foundation Ireland with a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology grant. During this time, DERI has grown to over 120 members.
Professor Stefan Decker, Director of DERI, says: “This is another example showing that investment in science and research has truly propelled Ireland into the forefront of technology. Our technology can bring a greater level of transparency and trust to governments as well as financial institutions - something that becomes increasingly important. The US Government has recognised this already".
The SIOC project from DERI at NUI Galway is already being used by a range of applications including Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Drupal.
The SIOC (pronounced ‘shock’ ) project was started in 2004 by John G. Breslin and Uldis Bojars at DERI, NUI Galway. In 2007, SIOC became a W3C Member Submission.
The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities ) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information.
By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was submitted by 16 organisations.
DERI is one of the largest applied research organisation developing the next generation of Internet technology - the Semantic Web. Founded in 2003 with CSET (Centre for Science and Engineering Technology ) funding from Science Foundation Ireland it has now companies like Cisco, Nortel and Ericsson industrial partners. DERI has since grown to 120 people and has acquired significant additional research funding from sources such as the European Union Framework Programmes, Enterprise Ireland, and industrial partnerships. For more information about DERI see http://www.deri.ie
