ELDC Award: Europe's Crème de la Crème of Linked Data and Semantic Web - 1st European Linked Data Award given

Thu, 09/17/2015 - 07:52, by Thomas Thurner

(Vienna, 16.09.2015) The new established European Linked Data Award was given to two top projects coming from the domain of Linked Data and the Semantic Web. With 53 submission coming form 22 countries this year’s ELDC showed that European Research and European Industry are capable to present top research and innovation within the sector.

Winner in the category "Linked Enterprise Data" is the dutch company NXP Semiconductors with their project NXP Enterprise Data Hub.  

The NXP Enterprise Data Hub integrates data and metadata from several enterprises systems, to provide a single, up-to-date ‘canonical’ source of information that is easy to use and that data consumers  - be they human or machine - can trust. NXP Semiconductors have taken the Linked Data principles to heart and successfully rolled out a Linked Data solution across the whole company. The jury finds that this is worth to honored by the ELDC 2015.

For the category "Linked Open Data" the pan-european consortia Open PHACTS won the price for their activities targeting a semantic interoperale drug discovery.

The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform has been developed to reduce barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia and for small businesses.  Researchers can use Open PHACTS to access vast amounts of pharmacological data, all from a single, simple interface. Developers get free access to the Open PHACTS API, to query the pharmacological data resources in an integrated triple store and Members of the Open PHACTS Foundation get prioritised access to data, support and updates, as well as training opportunities.

Herman Elenbaas from NXP Semiconductors and Gerhard Ecker, from Open PHACTS pointed in their acceptance speech to the importance of real world examples in the use of Linked Data and the Semantic Web and that projects like theirs stands for mature technolgical solutions based on Linked Data.

Also honored

Catergory Linked Enterprise Data
2nd: Czech project Drug Encyclopedia by Datlowe
3rd: Compliance Activator by the German company Analytical Semantics

Category Linked Open Data
2nd: The Graph of Things by the Insight Centre for Data Analytics - National University of Ireland
3rd: The LOD Laundromat by the Vrijee Universität Amsterdam 

About the ELDC

The ELDC awards prizes to stories, products, projects or persons presenting novel and innovative projects, products and industry implementations involving linked data. The two-step contest consists of a country wise nomination, followed by a pan-European selection. At the heart of the contest is an international jury of ambassadors from over 15 European countries. Those ambassadors act as country representatives to look out for the most exciting projects, people and products and elect the winner of the contest. This year the ELDC is awarded in the categories Linked Enterprise Data and Linked Open Data, with €1.500,- for each of the winners.