ALIGNED: successfully bringing new big data technologies from research into industry

VIENNA - Jan. 31, 2018 - PRLog -- After 3 years of collaboration between industry and academia and €4 million of funding from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 program, the ALIGNED project has successfully rolled out five trial platforms showcasing its success in applying the latest big-data research findings to solving the problems of industry.

The project tackled problems in a wide range of areas, and showed how the latest semantic technologies can help create smarter legal information systems, provide better management of health data and help construct high-quality archaeological and historical datasets. In all of these areas people are struggling to harness the available data and in all of these areas ALIGNED's semantic and model driven technologies were able to help.

According to Dr Kevin Feeney, of Trinity College Dublin,who coordinated the project, the critical insight is that, in the era of big-data, everybody is struggling with similar problems:

"the Internet has made vast quantities of data available to everybody, but the size and complexity of this data is such that new methods and technologies are needed for organising and managing it and for integrating it with software systems. Across all domains – from science, to medicine, publishing and data-intensive business applications – there are exciting new opportunities to apply big-data analytics to reveal new insights and breakthroughs, but existing tools tend to break at scale. Therefore, we have concentrated on developing some of the latest academic research in the area into software tools that can be used in industry. It's very satisfying to see these tools already being used in production systems in multiple domains to solve real problems."

Andreas Koller, from the Semantic Web Company, has focused on the PoolParty use case for enriching data quality management in the semantic technology suite and increase productivity in software development with the smart development assistant integrated in ATLASSIAN software development tools.

"We have taken the latest methodes and technologie to bring PoolParty to another level with data quality features our partners and customers have highly requested. The PoolParty software development team productivity has increased with the Smart Development Assistant based on the ALIGNED metamodel which is the basis for the PoolParty design intent ontology DIOPP developed together with the computer science researcher.

The science and engineering behind ALIGNED's research is described in simple terms in videos on the project's youtube channel, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRJAHer4rhNwlPnZO5Dastg