Slashdot Mirror
EU Google Competitor Project Gets Aid Worth $166 Million
mernil wrote with the news that the EU Commission has given the go-ahead to provide funding for Germany's search engine project, called Theseus. Early this year we discussed Germany's withdrawal from the French project Quaero. From the outside, it looks like the EU Commission is unwilling to put all its eggs in one basket, funding the German project to the tune of 120 million euro, or $US 166 million. Dow Jones reports: "The aim is to develop new search technologies for the next generation Internet, including 'semantic technologies which try to recognize the meaning of content and place it in its proper context.' The semantic Web has been considered the next evolution of the Internet at least since Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered a creator of the current version of the Internet, published an article describing it in 2001. In theory, a semantic Web could receive a user request for information about fishing, for example, and automatically narrow the results according to the user's individual needs rather than blanket the user with pages related to numerous aspects of fishing. The Commission's funding approval Thursday immediately sparked talk of building a potential European challenger to Web search leader Google Inc."
Yes, he is the inventor of the World Wide Web more or less, and the first http browser and server. I'm surprised you hadn't heard of him.
The problem is he didn't come close to inventing the Internet, hence the GP to this post. The Internet is just a big honkin wide area network that uses IP as it's underlying protocol. The Web is an application.
To put it in historical perspective, Tim took MIME that Einar Stefferud invented (Stef also invented and ran the first mailing list) and HTML (which came indirectly from Brian Reid's PhD thesis, brian also invented the firewall and alta vista) and glommed them all together and invented http. You can see Tim talking about this in comp.infosystems.www in the late 80s early 90s.
Pity there was no internet to shuffle all those usenet articles and mail about. No doubt that would have helped.
Gah.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Well, you probably haven't heard of most of the smaller, less glamorous projects funded by the European Commission. Some excerpts from descriptions of websites I've built for a couple of 'em, all in a particular subsection of industry:
"Innovative Integrated Energy Efficiency Solutions for Railway Rolling Stock, Rail Infrastructure and Train Operation."
"... will concentrate on fixed-formation passenger trains and universal locomotives capable of 200 km/h or more."
"... aims to integrate a fragmented research landscape, promote the railways' contribution to sustainable development and improve the competitiveness and economic stability of the European rail sector."
"Providing grounds for the establishment of 15,000 km of new and existing [railway] lines predominantly dedicated to freight."
"Develop modelling tools to improve the understanding of rail vehicles and passenger dynamics, particularly with respect to crash behaviour."
As you can see, there's probably about fifty million plus Euros of Commission money right there, quite obviously going into producing blatant knock-offs of American technological innovations.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
That is pretty much what the THESEUS program is! Lots of academic and institutional research groups with centrally coordinated goals and objectives.
From the about page of the THESEUS website http://theseus-programm.de/about_theseus:
"At the current time, 31 research institutions, universities, and companies have joined the THESEUS program with planned projects. The industrial and public research partners are cooperating closely."
It appears this project was mainly requested by German industry and from the website seems that it will closely involve industry. It's quite funny though how the story submitter and many commenters here have twisted the facts to make the project sound as socialist as possible!
The story should really fit the facts though rather than the facts fitting the story!
Why are people labelling this "big government bureaucracy"? Just because it's funded by the government, it doesn't have to be awful. PyPy, for example, was mostly funded by the EU, and that's very promising. KDE has been partially funded by governments as well.
It seems the situation is getting better in Germany in this regard, for example Hasso Plattner (one of SAP's founders) does exactly this.
No it's not. Venture Capital is not for basic research, it's for commercialization of already researched technology. If you don't put money for basic research, if you don't put it to high risk research, then you won't have any new technology that you can commercialize. And as I said, the US, Japanese, Chinese, Russians etc.. are already doing the same thing and thus it would be economical and industrial suicide to not do it.
As what comes to Europes economic growth and it's businesses, taxation or it's rate are not to be blamed. Yes, in some countries like German the tax laws are a mess, but all in all they are pretty workable. What does instead stifle businesses are work laws, or more on inflexibility in the job market: French and Germany come to a mind quick. If I would start from somewhere, it would changes to free job markets not stifle working government private sector partnership that does bring food on the table
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use