Koblenz receives HP Labs Innovation Research Award for research on Semantic Web

Hewlett-Packard is on a world-wide hunt for new research ideas. Also in this year, the HP Open Innovation Office has zoomed from several hundred proposals to an elite group of renowned research groups for funding part of their work. The research group “ISWeb – Information Systems and Semantic Web” led by Prof. Staab is one of only 15 European groups to be selected this year. The project leader, Dr. Maciej Janik, explains: “We work on new types of search that go beyond the mere listing of research results towards an explanation of how search results are related. A search result for `San Francisco’ should explain to me the relationships between the city, its history and plain travel facts.” For the coming cooperation with HP, the team would benefit from such search capabilities already now. Prof. Staab smiles “Making our ideas come true will be the real fun part now”.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab, Tel 0261 2872761, staab@uni-koblenz.de
List of 2009 awardees: http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/2009_results.html