Enabling Networked Knowledge

The vision of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute is to be recognised as one of the leading international web science research institutes interlinking technologies, information and people to advance business and benefit society.

The success and growth of the Internet and especially the World Wide Web have brought significant changes to everyday life and substantially transformed the way in which business, public, and private interactions are performed. The impact that the Internet and the World Wide Web have had on society can be compared to the introduction of the printing press at the beginning of the modern era.

The ability to transmit and store data instantly and with negligible cost has created a universe of accessible information and relationships. Businesses, individuals, governments, science, and society in general are now far more interconnected than they were just a decade ago. This transforms society itself as organisations and communities of individuals are no longer dependent on physical or temporal proximity and coordination.
Information can be exchanged in a virtual space independent of physical and temporal limitations. This wealth of available information and services has produced new opportunities and challenges for society, within Ireland, the EU, and world-wide. The discovery, integration, and exploitation of this humongous amount of information have become important challenges which require scalable infrastructures making the semantics of the information explicit and taking semantics into account in the processing of this information.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is taking on these challenges by defining and executing a research agenda and outreach activities targeted at enabling and supporting people, organisations, and systems to collaborate and interoperate on a global scale using semantic web technologies.

On DERI

DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established in 2003 with funding from the Science Foundation Ireland.

After more than five years of operation DERI has become an internationally recognised institute in semantic web research, education and technology transfer which directly contributes to the Irish government’s plan of transforming Ireland into a competitive knowledge economy. As a CSET, DERI brings together academic and industrial partners to boost innovation in science and technology, with its research focused on the Semantic Web. In the past five years DERI has developed into an internationally leading research centre, as documented by its large number of high-quality publications in core conferences, outnumbering any other research organisation world-wide in our field of research. DERI has acquired significant additional research funding from the European Union and Enterprise Ireland, rivalling the amount of the original CSET grant.

DERI has attracted companies to set up subsidiaries in Galway, for example, Cyntelix, which provides the seed for the Silicon Valley inspired “DERI Land”, an eco-system of companies and research partners composed around DERI know-how and technologies, which intends to transform the region into a technological powerhouse. DERI’s success over the last five years has also attracted further multi-national and local companies which expand its range of core industrial partners from Hewlett Packard to include Nortel, Cisco, Ericsson, IBM, Storm, and CelTrak.

DERI and Debategraph are joint-technical partners on the WAVE Project for the European Commission.