Pioneering work on the 'semantic web', which could make the internet smarter and faster, has attracted international interest, writes Karlin Lillington.

Research in Galway on the structure and function of tomorrow's internet - a worldwide web that will be much smarter and faster than today's - has achieved such a high global profile that several international companies are considering relocating to the city.

Work on the "semantic web" by NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) has attracted the interest of three companies with British, Dutch and American bases. All are in discussions with DERI to relocate to the Galway region where they can collaborate with and create industrial applications out of DERI's research, according to Prof Stefan Decker, director of DERI.

The companies focus on commercial applications in the areas of web infrastructure and data management - key research areas for DERI.

Although discussions are in the formative stages, Decker is hopeful all three will be operating out of Galway before long.

"This fits with the goal of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to have research in this area help bring more companies into the region," says Decker.

The semantic web is a more intelligent web whose computer network can intelligently filter and understand some of the meaning and relevance of the data it stores and accesses for web users. Decker describes it as a web that will be able to deliver answers rather than links for users. Pieces of data no longer will sit dumbly on the web but will have real meaning, just as the structure of a sentence allows words to combine to have function and meaning (or semantics). One of DERI's key projects is creating a semantic web search engine (SWSE).

"Semantic technologies are getting more and more interesting to people as more data becomes available on the web, and people want to access it," says Decker.

"Improving searches and getting more focused results is one important goal, but the semantic web can do many other things, too. For example, it makes business procedures and decisions much more informed. It enables machines to help you, rather than give arbitrary results like Google," he says.

Because of the increasing numbers of people using social networking tools such as weblogs and websites such as Flickr, where people can "tag" posts or pictures, videos or uploaded files of any sort with keywords, more data is arriving on the web with the kind of information the semantic web needs in order to work. Decker describes the semantic web as being in a phase of "exponential growth".

As a result, research and industry are very interested in talking to each other. Several DERI researchers are heading to Silicon Valley next week to present papers on the semantic web to one such gathering, the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose.

The presentations will include work by researcher Eyal Oren, who will speak about this work on ActiveRDF, which DERI describes as bridging the gap between the new data formats of the semantic web and the mainstream approach of object-oriented programming. RDF, or resource description framework, is a standard way of describing data on the internet so that it can be intelligently filtered by machines. Oren will also present DERI's ongoing work on semantic business process integration, which improves business-to-business integration, a multibillion dollar market.

Another researcher, Sebastian Kruk, who specialises in e-learning research, will present a semantic digital library, JeromeDL. Kruk says that JeromeDL makes use of many of the social networking annotation tools web users have become accustomed to - bookmarks, tags, friend lists - to bring in new layers of information that produce a more focused search.

"Each catalogue of information is annotated by you, using existing systems" like tags, he says, creating "a community-driven taxonomy" for information on the web that is most likely to be relevant to a given community - academic departments or a business division, for example.

The system can begin to understand relationships between people and make recommendations about other material held in the digital library that may be of interest. He says this is somewhat like the recommendations users of Amazon get from the online seller after they have bought items, but would be far more focused and informed.

JeromeDL can support future solutions in e-learning, web archiving and e-government, he says. DERI represents one of SFI's largest investments in the software area in the State and now has a broad 100-strong contingent of both Irish and international researchers working in this cutting edge area.

DERI is also currently the largest applied research organisation in the world focused on the semantic web.

Founded in 2003 with CSET (Centre for Science and Engineering Technology) funding from Science Foundation Ireland, DERI has since acquired significant additional research funding from sources such as the European Union framework programmes, Enterprise Ireland and SFI.