NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (Deri), set up in 2003 and funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) working on technologies that might be part of the next generation of the world wide web.

More than a decade on, that future web is with us now. And many ideas developed at Deri have indeed become part of a changing web, such as some of the standards now used to identify different types of objects and content on the internet.

"More and more people are adopting the technologies we worked on and helped to shape. What I find exciting is that a lot of what we've worked on has transitioned into reality," says Prof Stefan Decker, the director of Deri. Or rather, the former director, for, as of mid-2013, Deri is officially no more, even though its website lives on at deri.ie.

It has become one of several research divisions within a much larger, €75-million, SFI-funded organisation, called the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, comprising research groups from four Irish universities: NUI Galway, University College Dublin, University College Cork and Dublin City University.

Why the restructure?

“The intent is creating a bigger entity that can compete globally” for projects and funding, says Decker, who is one of the founding directors of Insight and heads the linked data group there.

Whereas Deri had about 140 employees, Insight has hundreds, across a broader range of related disciplines. Some international centres have several thousand researchers, Decker notes by way of comparison. Insight is better able to compete, compared with its far smaller component groups. The new organisation is still finding its feet, he says, as “creating a bigger organisation is always a challenge”.

But his team have retained Deri’s focus on the semantic web and linked data, with the aim of making the internet more useful and usable through better identification and classification of its content. This is turn makes the web more easy to search as it continues to expand.

The team have been busy. They've built an open data model for the Irish Government, which should help bodies within government to figure out what data might be released into the public domain for anyone from researchers to app developers to tinker with. "We're working now to see how this can be ingrained within the public service," he says.

They have also been to Brussels recently to propose the development of a “Magna Carta for data”, establishing basic principles and ethics on data and finding ways to balance the competing interests of individuals, corporations and society.

If a set of rights, protections and opportunities in relation to data can be determined for each group, technologies could be developed that would automatically identify and manage data appropriately, Decker says.

This could lead to greater online trust, and support new services and other innovations, while also safeguarding sensitive data.

Decker developed the idea from an initial proposal by the world wide web creator, Tim Berners-Lee, for a Magna Carta for the web.

“But data is probably the better focus,” Decker says. “People are not looking for web protection and web privacy. They are looking for data protection and data privacy.”

Along with a range of independent projects, such as the Magna Carta, the organisation also has industrial partners, including large multinationals, such as Cisco, Fujitsu Labs and Elsevier, and smaller Irish companies, such as Treemetrics in Cork.

“It’s a good collective, and we’re constantly on the outlook for acquiring more partners,” Decker says.

In some cases, co-funding for projects comes from SFI, but Decker notes that it can be easier to have full funding from an industry partner.

This removes the complexity of having funding more narrowly governed by EU rules, and intellectual property issues are simpler and “less encumbered”.

Broad field

SFI funding is also essential to Insight, as it supports basic infrastructure and research, he says.

Insight’s focus on data analytics means it encompasses a broad field, Decker says, covering “everything from open data to the ‘internet of things’. But that reflects the fact that data is much more important now. We’re thinking a lot about synergies, about combining data, freeing it and aggregating it – which, again, opens the door of privacy issues. It’s a complicated field, but I think it can do much for society.”

His personal view, he says, is that a move is needed “towards liberating the world’s knowledge, freeing it from lots of individual silos” where it remains isolated and available only to experts in given fields.

One way of looking at what Insight is working towards is a kind of equivalent of a web browser for data, Decker says. “That could allow society to take advantage of the data deluge. It’s an interesting discussion to see how far this could go.”

He thinks it could be quite a disruptive development. Right now, if a biologist, say, or a technology startup, needs data analysis done, a data specialist has to be brought in.

Decker believes that data can and should be more accessible, with the consequence that the difficulty of doing data analytics would be reduced. This could result in many different developments, from supporting breakthroughs in health research to bringing down the cost of starting a business.

Much remains to be done in relation to Deri’s original remit of finding ways to name and identify objects on the web – the semantic web work.

“That problem is not completely solved, but we have enough now to focus on how it can be exploited,” Decker says. “Progress isn’t just in developing the individual technologies [for identification of data], but in adoption [by people of those systems].”

More and more people are adding semantic data to the web now, “and from a research perspective, this is very exciting”, Decker says.