The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), based at NUI Galway, has won second place in the prestigious Elsevier Grand Challenge.
The Elsevier Grand Challenge is a global competition that invites researchers to prototype tools dealing with the ever-increasing amount of online life-sciences information.
DERI was competing with more than 70 groups from universities and research organisations worldwide.
In its submitted work, entitled ‘CORAAL – Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge’, DERI developed a prototype to integrate knowledge representation and reasoning technologies in life-science publications to better integrate, search and retrieve life-sciences knowledge.
Commenting on the win, Dr Siegfried Handschuh, SFI Stokes lecturer at NUI Galway and research leader of the Semantic Collaboration team at DERI, said: “This is a very significant achievement for our team, as the competition for this prize has been very strong.
“Within our research of semantic authoring and publishing, we have been following the general vision of changing the way science is communicated and published for quite a long time, and Elsevier has provided a lot of real-world data for the challenge that can be used to test our tools and make them work better.
“The contest has provided us with a fantastic opportunity to present our work to an international audience, and we very much plan to build on that success”.
Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI, said: “Life sciences is an important application area for the technologies that DERI is creating. Research made in Ireland is becoming a brand name.”
Founded in 2003, with CSET (Centre for Science and Engineering Technology) funding from Science Foundation Ireland and Hewlett-Packard Galway as its main industrial partner, DERI is an applied research organisation devoted to developing the next generation of internet technology, the semantic web.
For more information, visit www.deri.ie.
Carmel Doyle
