After 2,5 years of intensive research and programming efforts, the entire Openwebsearch.eu project team is excited to grant access to its pilot of the first-ever federated pan-European Open Web Index (OWI).
From June onward, commercial and scientific development teams of any size as well as interested individuals are welcome to access and make use of almost a petabyte (and growing) of open web data under a general research license or – upon request – under a designated commercial license as well.
Given that the European Commission has launched the InvestAI initiative to mobilize €200 billion of investment in artificial intelligence, the Open Web Index comes with perfect timing.
The OpenWebSearch.eu consortium actively calls early adopters to pioneer innovative projects surrounding vertical web search, argumentative search, LLM applications including RAG and more.
“The OWI symbolizes a first step towards true European digital sovereignty and is a fundamental step in paving the way for a comprehensive open European AI landscape.“ says Community Manager Ursula Gmelch and further:
“Our goal behind this initial pilot phase is to onboard a range of projects from diverse domains to get early feedback in. We look forward to users confirming the quality and value in current functionalities and/or helping us pivot in such ways that real market demands can be met and further expanded upon.“
An official kick-off event will be hosted on 6 June from 10 am to 12 am CEST via Zoom.
Registration to the event is open under the following link:
https://cscfi.zoom.us/meeting/register/eATIpDQ5TZidh4Jzkim6FQ#/registration
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I sounds interesting. Can someone eli5 this for me?
It’s an open web index. Basically the data that web search engines like Google need to be usable. Without the data, they are as good as nothing.
Instead of being another web search engine, OWI provides APIs and data to external applications, so you can build on top of this data.
Thats awesome! I assumed that could be the case but then they started puking the word ai over and over and lost interest. Whats up with mentioning ai in the article?
Edit: thank you very much
Well, OWI is also planning on letting LLM companies to train their LLM on this data.
That doesnt sound great… :(
I don’t think we can get rid of LLMs, but at the very least this allows other companies that aren’t one of the conglomerates to provide those as well
I dont think we need to get rid of them. We have to outlaw the extreme use of them and regulate their energy, water and resource consumption.
It doesnt help that everyone can get the data to train them. They need to be scaled down massively.
