Description of organisation
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) - was founded in 2003, funded by a CSET grant from SFI, renewed in 2008. Today DERI hosts in excess of 130 members and has established itself as a top player worldwide in the Linked Data / Semantic Web / Web / Web Science field, as ranked by Microsoft Academic Search. DERI is one of the main actors in research and development of Web technologies and has acquired direct research awards in excess of €60 million from SFI, Enterprise Ireland, and EU framework programmes. Its core mission is to enable and exploit globally interconnected, integrated, and accessible machine readable knowledge, vastly improving human problem solving capabilities in business, science and society. This strategy has been formulated as “Enabling Networked Knowledge”.
The research institute has significant experience working with more than 200 industry and public partners in collaborative projects, including various pharmaceutical companies such as UCB and Eli Lilly. DERI researchers have published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers. DERI technology is also used in open source software with millions of users and organisations world-wide including the the UK Data.gov.uk site, the United States Government Data portal data.gov, the European Commission, Irish Central Statistics Office, Yahoo!, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and many others. Technology developed by DERI is driving 100,000s of Websites (for example in the Content Management System Drupal) and is installed on countless desktops (as technology by DERI is part of any Linux installation). DERI members actively participate in 17 standardisation activities (W3C, OASIS)
DERI has been very successful in bringing in EU funding from FP6 programme into Ireland in the last 8 years. To date DERI has participated in or coordinated 8 IPs, 17 STREPs, 4 NOEs, 2 CA, 2 CIP PSPs, 1 MC, 2 COST Actions, 4 Other EC funding programmes, with total funding of €17.58 million since 2004. DERI actively participates in and leads research funded by the EU FP7 programme CONET, MONNET and Net2 Marie Curie IRSES, SPITFIRE, LOD2, ROBUST, ClOUD4SOA, DIGITAL.ME, Granatum, Linked2Safety, SEMLIB, Linked2Media, OpenIoT, GAMBAS, PROMISE, EUROSENTIMENT, BIG and projects in other complementary work programmes like Puzzled By Policy CIP PSP.
Profile of staff members
Prof. Stefan Decker is a full professor at the National University of Ireland and the director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway. Prof Decker obtained in 1995 a master degree in Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern (awarded with distinction). From 1995 to 1999 he worked towards a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe (awarded 2002 with distinction). From 1999-2002 he worked as a Postdoc and Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University and established one of the first Semantic Web research groups. From July 2002 to July 2005, he worked as a Computer Scientist and Research Assistant Professor at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, USA. Since October 2003 Prof Decker moved to Ireland to help to set up a new Research Institute concerned with the Semantic Web. Since July 2006 Prof Decker is professor and director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute. His current research interests include the Semantic Web, metadata, ontologies and semi-structured data, web services, and applications for Digital Libraries, Knowledge Management, Information Integration and Peer
