The RE-SEARCH ALPS (Research Laboratories in the Alpine Area) Project

The paper describes the RE-SEARCH ALPS project, which aims to gather, consolidate, harmonize and make available to different targets (public and private bodies working at local, regional and national level) data about laboratories, research and innovation centers which are active in particular in the regions of seven countries which constitute the Alpine Area (France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Slovenia). The project is complemented with a search engine which allows the users to directly query the dataset and to obtain geo referenced data as result. The data will be properly visualized thanks a visualizer developed in the project. From a research perspective, the project has to address hot and challenging Big Data issues, such as big data integration (to join data sources), entity recognition and linkage in large amount of data (to discover the same Institution represented in different sources), data cleaning and reconciliation (to address issues related to different representation of the same real object). The project has been applied in a call for the cration of Open Datasets promoted by the European Innovation and Networks Executive Agency through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) funding instrument. The project has been recently approved (AGREEMENT No INEA/CEF/ICT/A2016/1296967): it lasts two years and will start on July 2017.