Three proposals with the involvement of Ontotext were approved for funding by the H2020 program of the European Commission in Q3 2018: WeVerify, EXA MODE and InnoRate. The total amount of the financing for Ontotext in these projects is 1 386 000 EUR. WeVerify will be the first to start in December 2018, while EXA MODE and InnoRate will start in January 2019, subject to finalization and signing of the consortium agreements and grant agreements.
Earlier, in Q2 2018, Ontotext won financing and started work on the Intelligent Matching and Linking of Company Data (CIMA) project. The financing for Ontotext in this project is 779 605 BGN (approx. 398 498 EUR) and its duration is until May 2020. This way, the amount of new R&D funding, which Ontotext secured in 2018, increased to a total of 1.8M EUR.
WeVerify (ICT-28-2018-IA/825297) aims to address the information verification challenges through a participatory verification approach, low-overhead human-in-the-loop machine learning algorithms and intuitive visualizations. A key outcome will be the WeVerify platform for collaborative, decentralized content verification as well as tracking and debunking of incorrect information. Ontotext will lead the work on using blockchain technology to confirm the authenticity of judgment calls by journalists when they perform data verification and expose fake news. Ontotext is the coordinator of the consortium, which includes leading universities and some of the biggest news agencies in Europe. The project’s duration will be 3 years.
EXA MODE (ICT-12-2018-2020/825292) is a Big Data project for Healthcare. It involves the development and release of extreme analytic methods and tools that are adopted in decision making by hospitals. Deep learning will be used to build semantic representations of entities and relations in multimodal data. Knowledge discovery will be performed via enrichment of text with semantic metadata and the extraction of homogeneous features from heterogeneous images. The results will be fused, aligned to medical ontologies, visualized and refined. This knowledge will be applied to compress, segment and classify medical images and will be exploited in decision support. The project’s duration will be 4 years.
InnoRate (INNOSUP-09-2018/821518) is set on deploying a trusted, objective and recognized service platform across Europe to support and improve the decision-making processes of investors and lenders for vetting, prioritizing and providing access to finance to innovative small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) with high growth potential. The suite of decision support tools and services provided through the InnoRate platform are underpinned by new methodologies for assessment and rating of innovations. These methodologies go beyond the backward-looking and costly practices currently employed to evaluate and signal the technological and business potential and risks of market-creating innovations.
InnoRate will leverage semantic technology, existing data sources and in-depth human expertise, to minimize the efforts of investors and lenders in this respect, reducing knowledge asymmetries and ultimately risk premiums paid by innovative project managers. InnoRate is a coordination and support action project with duration of 3 years.
In July, a consortium including Ontotext won the Tracking of Research Results (TRR) tender of the European Commission. The maximum available budget for the TRR framework contract is 4.0M EUR for a period of 4 years. The detailed work plan for the first phase of the project from October 2018 until April 2019 was negotiated and the corresponding Specific Contract 1 was signed on the 12th of October 2018. Ontotext’s part of the budget for the first phase is 465 000 EUR.
The TRR project aims to enable the policy makers in research and innovation to access, analyze and disseminate the outcomes and impacts of the funded research results in a more comprehensive manner. A consortium including Ontotext won the TRR tender (2017/RTD/J5/OP/PP-05381-2017/TRR) with a proposal aiming to collect the best quantitative and qualitative information about 8000 projects and to determine the impact that the research results might have in the medium and long term. The scope of the project includes the identification and tracing of information about research results, new products based on them, inventors and patents as well as startups and enterprises that exploit them.
As a leading technology partner in TRR, Ontotext will perform semantic data integration to build a science and innovation knowledge graph, combining information from multiple sources. Ontotext will also develop impact indicators.
CIMA, InnoRate and TRR will use Ontotext’s existing technology for matching descriptions of people, organizations, locations and other types of entities across different sources. This technology is already proven in commercial projects for the biggest business information agencies, rating agencies and investment consultants. CIMA will bring Ontotext’s company matching algorithms and products to a new level. In TRR, Ontotext will extend its Market Intelligence knowledge models with better capabilities for tracing and interlinking of inventions, products and investment transactions based on the analysis of scientific publications, patents, market reports and company data as well as business, technology and financial news. InnoRate provides a challenging use case for benchmarking small innovative companies, based on a combination of structured profiles and market trends derived from diverse sources.
These new projects bring the total amount of financing secured to support Ontotext’s strategic R&D plans to 3.1M EUR for 2018 and the following years. These plans foresee the development of vertical knowledge models and specific applications for SENPAI – the enterprise AI platform of Sirma Group Holding (SKK:BLG). Vertical knowledge models represent big volumes of factual data about the corresponding domain integrated into knowledge graphs as well as analytical modules and interfaces, based on these graphs. The interfaces represent a set of tools, which facilitate the efficient use of information and knowledge such as chatbots, intelligent search, personalized recommendations and graphical visualizations. This financing is allocated by strategic verticals as follows: 1.9M EUR for Market Intelligence and Publishing and 1.2M EUR for Health Care and Life Sciences.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext