EU open data fund to link innovation 'bubbles', says pioneer

"A major EU investment in open data research will help link up 'bubbles' of innovation currently scattered across the continent, according to one open data pioneer in France. The EU has committed €14.4m (£11m) from its Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme to three initiatives designed to catalyse open data innovation across the continent, in what is claimed to be the largest investment of its kind in the world to date. The initiatives build on UK and international work by the Open Data Institute (ODI), a non-profit body co-founded by inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. First is a €7.8m, 30-month Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODinE), a start-up support programme based on a similar ODI project which has backed 18 UK companies. The ODI will help deliver the EU incubator, working with partners including University of Southampton and the Guardian newspaper in the UK; Fraunhofer research institute and Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany; and Wayra, a start-up incubator set up by Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica. ODInE will launch in Spring 2015 and aims to recruit about 50 startups by the end of the programme with each gaining up to €100k to develop their concept plus mentoring and technology support. The second EU investment is of €3.7m to set up a European web data research network, funding 15 PhD researchers over four years to examine approaches to answering complex questions with web data, including combining data which is licensed in different ways. Partners in WDAqua (Web Data and Question Answering) include University of Bonn in Germany; Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne in France and University of Athens. The third project will create a new European Data Science Academy (EDSA), a collaboration between nine academic research partners in the UK, Slovenia, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands ..."