Data is becoming the main driver in an increasing number of areas within both academia and industry. Integrating and leveraging data from both public and private sources leads to new discoveries, enables pioneering developments, and results in innovative products. With stakeholders growing in number and variety, the data landscape gets ever more diverse, rich, and interesting. However, this increasing heterogeneity in users and data also gives rise to new challenges: Data descriptions need to serve a general audience instead of just a single project; Suitable datasets need to be identified amongst myriads of potential candidates and sources; The understanding of terms and concepts varies between different stakeholders and needs to be matched to one another.
While the Semantic Web promises to alleviate these and other challenges, we are not quite there yet and the full potential of data-driven research and economy is still to be unleashed..
The central theme of the group is making data available not just in its initial context but beyond the boundaries of projects, institutions, and communities. In collaboration with our partners, our activities revolve around the following key research areas and questions: