Community Program of OpenWebSearch.EU Project: 1st Open Call for the Third-Parties

Description

OpenWebSearch.eu aims at building and piloting a legally compliant Open Web Index as a European infrastructure. The third-party calls are essential for stimulating an ecosystem around open search and important part of project exploitation plan.  The OpenWebSearch.eu project consortium is eager to on-board new third-party project teams in OpenWebSearch.eu landscape and integrate them in the future activities for sustainable Research and Development. Therefore, the candidate third-party project should probe the closely related topics addressed in the project and should aim at widening and enriching the existing R&D activities as well as suggesting new ones which are complementary to the project goals and aims.  This first call consists of two tracks: Track 1: Conceptual contributions on legal or economic aspects of Open Search; Building an Open Web Index (OWI) does not only include technical challenges, but also legal and societal ones, especially when considering recent EU legislation like the Digital Service Act or the Digital Market Act. Furthermore, challenges for new business models or significant changes in the search engine market arise. The consortium seeks for two possible kinds of studies: Legal Studies to analyse and understand legal constraints and requirements for building and operating an OWI, which includes, but is not limited to (i) compilation and analysis of the laws and norms that are relevant to building and maintaining an OWI, (ii) legal assessment of technical and non-technical prevention mechanism, (iii) legal assessment of the implications of the right to de-referencing for an OWI or (iv) analysis of existing open source and open data licenses in regard to the suitability for usage in an OWI. Economic Studies for setting up and maintaining an OWI as public European infrastructure. This includes, but is not limited to studies for analysing and estimating the costs associated with setting up, operating and maintaining a distributed open web index infrastructure across Europe and analysing and estimating the market potential and economic impact of such an infrastructure. Track 2: Technical approaches to legally compliant data acquisition considering societal constraints:   Web crawling is the predominant method for web search engines to gather content for their index. However, webmaster and content owners have only limited control over the crawling process via mostly proprietary services. OpenWebSearch.eu is looking for concepts and approaches for opening the proprietary components and provide webmasters and content owners with more control over the crawling process and the usage of their content. Envisioned solutions should be technical in nature, including new metadata schemata/ontologies, algorithms / services for collecting website metadata, services and tools for webmaster and content owners to define legal constraints for crawling as well as open datasets and machine learning models for analysing and filtering web pages during the crawling process.

Beneficiary & submission

The OpenWebSearch.eu project consortium is eager to identify new project teams to be funded under the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme, on-board and integrate them into ongoing and future activities for sustainable Research and Development on Open Web Search.  Third-party activities are driving forces in the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme, with funding provided by the OpenWebSearch.eu project (funded by the EU under the GA 101070014). In spring 2023 the OpenWebSearch.eu Community Programme is coming to life. The Community Programme is comprised of activities in support of third-party project initiation, execution and successful completion.  The applicants have to submit their appropriately formatted proposal by email to the call management (call1@openwebsearch.eu for the first call) by the given deadline. The proposal template is available for the applicants. Applicant(s) can submit at most one application per call. English is the main language for communication with the OpenWebSearch.eu consortium, and all submitted documents must be written in English. The submission will be acknowledged by the call management, and, only after the confirmation, the proposal can be considered as being submitted. It is advised not to wait till the last moment with the submission. Note that multiple submissions of the same project are not accepted. If the submission is not confirmed within max. 2 days, and provided the call deadline has not yet passed, you may contact the Grantor at call1@openwebsearch.eu to request the information and ask for re-submission. Topical fit and contribution to the project has been set as the key criteria for the selected third-party projects. Thus, the call addresses specific questions in the project raised by the consortium members. The evaluation will be conducted by external experts in cooperation with the members of the project consortium. Relevance to at least one of the call tracks and complementarity to the project,  Contribution to the goals of at least one of the five main components of the OpenWebSearch.eu project: (i) Crawling and Crawl Management, (ii) Pre-processing and Enrichment, (iii) Indexing, Search Paradigms and Search Architectures, (iv) Search Verticals, Data Products and Applications, (v) Data Storage, Provenance, and Computing Infrastructure,  Importance of the target community or ecosystem,  Expected impact for Open Search in general (also beyond the pilot infrastructure), Feasibility. In total 100 points will be distributed among the categories 1-5. Besides the above listed criteria, formal eligibility criteria in accordance with the grant agreement and European Regulations must be fulfilled, particularly on the target group and official funding criteria. Following the Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/2506, as of 16th December 2022, no legal commitments can be signed with Hungarian public interest trusts established under Hungarian Act IX of 2021 or any entity they maintain. Affected entities may continue to apply to calls for proposals. However, in case the Council measures are not lifted, such entities are not eligible to participate in any funded role (beneficiaries, affiliated entities, subcontractors, recipients of financial support to third parties). In this case, co-applicants will be invited to remove or replace that entity and/or to change its status into associated partner. Tasks and budget may be redistributed accordingly Please note that in the Funding &Tender portal there is a FAQs focusing on the specific implications for Horizon Europe actions which will be regularly updated.

Further information

Details on this call: https://openwebsearch.eu/community/call1/  Details on the OpenWebSearch Community Programme: https://openwebsearch.eu/community/ Contact for informal information w.r.t the calls and other community activities: community@openwebsearch.eu Project website: https://openwebsearch.eu/ More information about the Next Generation Internet:  https://www.ngi.eu/