Posted: 27/11/15
A new milestone in the development of the Horizon 2020 project ALIGNED has recently been completed. The international team, which consists of computer scientists (Trinity College Dublin, University of Oxford, University of Leipzig), software companies (Semantic Web Company), information companies (Wolters Kluwer) and academic curators (Seshat:Global History Databank), now move into the next phase of the project which aims to lay the foundations for the next generation of big data systems that can lower costs and deal with the web data challenges of dynamism, complexity, scale and inconsistency.
The successful completion of phase one of the ALIGNED project included gathering software and data engineering requirements for four data intensive systems (the Seshat Global History Databank, an open repository of expert-curated historical time-series data (JURION, a legal information service platform containing over 1 million documents; DBpedia, a structured representation of knowledge at the centre of the current web of data; and PoolParty, an enterprise software suite for ontology, taxonomy and thesaurus management). The ALIGNED team also published the first version of a Linked Data metamodel for combined software and data engineering, available online at aligned-project.eu/data-and-models/. This forms the basis for tool integration and improved productivity and agility when developing data intensive systems on the web.
Three demonstrator systems were also built for Seshat, JURION, and PoolParty. Short video clips are available on YouTube showcasing and visualising the work done to date (Seshat shows the building of new data validation, curation and transformation tools; JURION highlights how it can be made easier for system engineers to improve data quality and maintain datasets; PoolParty, shows ways to improve and monitor data consistency in real time). A number of research papers and reports are also available online.
ALIGNED commenced in February 2015 and is actively tackling the challenges of building modern data-intensive systems on the web. ALIGNED is an affilitate project of the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology. The team are confronting issues that include managing data quality, integrating software and data engineering and improving productivity and agility. The team are connecting with companies of all sizes who are facing these challenges and can be contacted through the enquiry form on the website. More information on the ALIGNED project is also available on Twitter and Facebook.
Share this article:
