Posted: 3rd December 2015

A new milestone in the development of the Horizon 2020 project ALIGNED has recently been completed.  The successful completion of phase one of the project included gathering software and data engineering requirements for four data intensive systems (the Seshat Global History Databank, an open repository of expert-curated historical time-series data (http://seshatdatabank.info/; JURION, a legal information service platform containing over 1 million documents (https://www.jurion.de/; DBpedia, a structured representation of knowledge at the centre of the current web of data (http://wiki.dbpedia.org/; and PoolParty, an enterprise software suite for ontology, taxonomy and thesaurus management (https://www.poolparty.biz/)).

The ALIGNED team also published the first version of a Linked Data metamodel for combined software and data engineering, available online at aligned-project.eu/data-and-models/.

Short video clips are available on YouTube showcasing and visualising the work done to date (Seshat shows the building of new data validation, curation and transformation tools: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqNtpSClczU;

JURION highlights how it can be made easier for system engineers to improve data quality and maintain datasets: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aLXK7N7wFE;

PoolParty, shows ways to improve and monitor data consistency in real time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKUiN3DT94w). 

The chief goal of ALIGNED is the development of software that will allow developers to incorporate big data from the web into their applications, such that flexible apps and analytics can use data that exists in a variety of formats. This will lay the foundations for the next generation of big data systems that lower costs and deal with the challenges of dynamism, complexity, scale, and data inconsistency on the web.

The project will now move into the next phase, which aims to lay the foundations for the next generation of big data systems that can lower costs and deal with the web data challenges of dynamism, complexity, scale and inconsistency.

ALIGNED brings together world class computer science researchers (Trinity College Dublin, the University of Oxford, and the University of Leipzig), software companies specialised in data-intensive systems (Semantic Web Company), information companies (Wolters Kluwer) and academic curators of the Seshat: Global History Databank, large datasets describing world history and archaeology (University of Oxford, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań).

More information on the ALIGNED project is also available here: http://aligned-project.eu/about-us