GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

This first call consists of two tracks:

Track 1: Conceptual contributions on legal or economic aspects of Open Search

The consortium seeks for two possible kinds of studies:

• Legal Studies to analyse and understand legal constraints and requirements for building and operating an OWI. In particular, research studies which analyse the legal constraints and requirements of crawling, storing, aggregating, enriching and sharing web data operationally in an OWI.
• Economic Studies for setting up and maintaining an OWI as public European infrastructure. This includes but is not limited to studies for analysing and estimating the costs associated with setting up, operating and maintaining a distributed open web index infrastructure across Europe and analysing and estimating the market potential and economic impact of such an infrastructure.

Track 2: Technical approaches to legally compliant data acquisition considering societal constraints

Web crawling is the predominant method for web search engines to gather content for their index. However, webmaster and content owners have only limited control over the crawling process via mostly proprietary services. OpenWebSearch.eu is looking for concepts and approaches for opening the proprietary components and provide webmasters and content owners with more control over the crawling process and the usage of their content. Envisioned solutions should be technical in nature, including new metadata schemata/ontologies, algorithms / services for collecting website metadata, services and tools for webmaster and content owners to define legal constraints for crawling as well as open datasets and machine learning models for analysing and filtering web pages during the crawling process.