National University of Ireland (NUI-DERI), Ireland

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