Collibra at the Future Internet Symposium

Back to back with the European Semantic Technology Conference (covered in a previous post), Vienna hosted the Future Internet Symposium, also organized by STI International, and chaired by John Domingue, Deputy Director at the Knowledge Media Institute and freshly elected president at STI. The Future Internet is recent research trend, originated in the Bled initiative, and aims at directing and aligning efforts towards the enormous information overload we will face on the next generation on the Internet. As a knowledge economy, Europe should play a leading role in this challenge. The symposium took place in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, Austria.

A general trend throughout the Symposium is the incredible growth of both structured and unstructured information on the Web, and how this will require new ways of working through it.

A few highlights:

• Michael Brodie,  Chief Scientist at Verizon, showed how the Internet is actually a Digital Universe, and stated that we should try to treat it as such, for instance by adopting holistic objectives for the design process. He presented some grand challenges ahead that need to be resolved for the next generation of the Internet.
• João de Silva, Director at the Network and Communication DG-INFSO of the EC, presented the challenges that are waiting around the corner, caused by the exponential growth of information on the Web and the speed of adoption of mobile technology. His presentation is a clear direction for both researchers and industry in the field.
• Our Research Director, Pieter De Leenheer, elaborated on semantic challenges and opportunities for the Internet of the future. He claims that the technological success of the Internet still could not avoid a rampant growth of isolated ontologies and a massive dump of unstructured legacy data, and how the next generation of the Internet requires a paradigm shift. He then illustrated how Collibra enables this paradigm shift, as well as how this relates to current research projects.