Europe unplugged? Open and Compliant Web Data for AI Factories, Web Analytics, Search and more!
Attending the European Big Data Value Forum, you know the importance of data for many types of innovations. The biggest data source mankind has created is the Web. The Open Web Search Initiative continues its work to make Web data available as a resource at scale for European researchers, start-ups, innovators and industry. The initiative has created the first European Open Web Index, as a starting point for a European Web Data Infrastructure that can be used by innovators, start-ups, researchers, public institutions and more for building search, analytics and AI solutions. This infrastructure strategically supports Europe’s digital sovereignty and helps growing European technological competitiveness. The Open Web Index is built open-source and is deployed across various high performance computing centres in Europe. Already today, the pilot infrastructure offers access to Web datasets at petabyte scale, including Web collections, Web indices and multilingual text corpora: ready-to-use by researchers, start-ups, innovators and industry to build value oriented, trustworthy AI/LLM, analytics and search solutions in and for Europe.
The session will look into the current state of the Open Web Search Initiative after successful completion of the OpenWebSearch.EU project and will discuss Open Web Data access in the EuroHPC and AI Factory context – including current and future developments. As one key element, the session will look at legal aspects of using Web data at scale for search, analytics, AI and more, discussing findings of the PriDI research project and related studies on the European regulatory landscape. The session will present a vision and roadmap for how a European Web Data Infrastructure can be scaled across Europe and what needs to be done to turn this into a reality – for European innovation, sovereignty and competitiveness in the digital sphere and beyond.
