Find the most recent information on EU Funding activities in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by visiting our ICT in FP7 website, which covers ICT in the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) 2007 - 2013.
“Challenges of Future Search Engines” Consultation Workshop
September 15th , 2005
Centre de Conferences A. Borchette - Rue Froissart, 36
Bruxelles
News on Call for Proposals
Context
As part of the preparation of future research initiatives in the context of the EU sponsored IST programme, the Commission is currently exploring the possible inclusion of R&D activities on future search engines in the context of networked electronic media. Today, search engines have evolved from an enabling technology to a business enabler and market differentiator. Search engines are also getting increasingly valuable as a 2-way tool (capturing usage traffic from actual knowledge-gathering searches). Potentially access to information filtered according to linguistic or other cultural and educational attributes.
Search engines of today are based on well established technologies, of which some have emerged as huge commercial successes. However, the evolution of on-line content consumption will open a range of new challenges. Among those, the following may be mentioned:
Beyond the Web revolution, mobile is becoming a mainstream medium for data exchange and access. With more than 1.5 Bn mobile users in the world and a significant proportion of them expected to migrate towards 3G or other mobile broadband type systems, with media consumption on a mobile terminal expected to become common place .Broadband image communication may put additional constraints on search engine technologies and architectures;
Data explosion is another factor emerging as an irreversible trend. The total number of Internet sites was estimated to be of 64 million in June 2005, with growth rates of 20% per year. With proliferation of data, formats also become more numerous and richness of the content evolves far beyond pure text description. Future search engine will have to cope with this explosion of data, of formats, and of content diversity;
New forms of data search and exchange such as Peer-to-peer are becoming dominant. Every day, the data volume equivalent to 3 billion songs, or 5 million movies, freely zips along a protean web of diverse P2P file-sharing networks. According to 2004 OECD estimates, each moment of time, on average, 10 million internet-connected users are simultaneously exchanging 10 petabytes of data, mostly in the form of copyrighted songs, movies, software and video games. This may also possibly put specific constraints on future search engine technologies;
Heterogeneity of networked infrastructures is expected to become common place in the future, with users being “optimally” connected without a priori knowledge of underlying network infrastructure or the service provider. Various search environments may be envisaged, including the personal computer, the enterprise domain, or the open Internet domain. Heterogeneity of computing environments may also impose specific challenges on contextual navigation and information retrieval across a diversity of terminals and platforms.
|
Against this background, the Information Society and Media Directorate-General is organising a consultation workshop to identify the major challenges in the domain of audiovisual search engines. To frame the debate, the following non limitative set of issues is tentatively proposed for presentation and further discussion:
|
The magnitude of the issue, in terms of economic opportunity and market creation of maintaining a cultural diversity “spectrum”, of appropiate data/formats and content explosion;
Organisation
Participation to this workshop is by invitation only.
Participants may submit short position papers (mail to: Martine.Vermaut at ec.europa.eu) addressing the above questions, or other issues deemed of relevance, which will be distributed to participants at the meeting.
The workshop will give an opportunity to present views from industry and academia/research institutions. You may want to complement those with short position statements (3-5 minutes and maximum 3 slides) during the afternoon session. Prior submission to the meeting secretary is greatly appreciated . Participants are kindly asked to refrain from presentations of their organisations.
After the meeting, a final summary report will be elaborated and communicated via email to the participants for their further comment and validation.
For more practical information, please, check our info page.
Meeting secretary: Martine.Vermaut at ec.europa.eu
Content-related enquiries: Loretta.Anania at ec.europa.eu