2025 EDITION

Reclaim the Web! Towards sovereign AI, Analytics and Search Services in Europe

November 13, 2025 - 12:00 - 13:00

Room 0.B / Norrebros Runddel

Data is a central ingredient for many European innovations and the Web is the biggest data source mankind has created. The OpenWebSearch.eu project is working to make Web data available as a resource at scale to European researchers, start-ups, innovators and industry. For this purpose, OpenWebSearch.eu is developing an open European Web data infrastructure that can be used for search, analytics and AI. The initiative supports Europe’s digital sovereignty and helps promote European competitiveness in the digital sphere.

OpenWebSearch.EU provides a prototype of the European Open Web Index, based on open-source software and deployed across various high performance computing centres in Europe. This infrastructure and the Open Web Index is particularly crucial for the provision of state-of-the-art Web search services, Web analytics and for European innovations in the domain of AI/Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (aka “AI Search”).

We build an infrastructure to establish and maintain relevant Web datasets at Peta- byte-scale, including raw Web collections, Web indices and large multilingual text corpora as well as multimodal data sets at the various EuroHPC centres: 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. We are confident that sharing these datasets across Europe by hosting them very close to or directly at the HPC facilities is the most effective way.

The Open Web Index can support many research and business applications. The session will explain the need for such a public Web data infrastructure and show the achievements in the OpenWebSearch.EU project. Concrete examples of Open Web Index applications will be presented and discussed and a strategic outlook on further possibilities of its usage in practice, including future governance model structure and a financial model for the Open Search ecosystem will be given.