Promoting Research Through Web Technologies

Old almost as the research itself, the problem of putting research results to use has troubled human society for a long time. Research outcomes and innovative findings often stay miles away from those who need them and who can make (commercial use) of them. In this whitepaper we explore the possibilities of Web technologies to help bridge this gap. We show how providing access to data, building social interfaces and using semantically rich formats, can give way to increased visibility of research results and competent researchers. Although Social and Semantic Web technologies are already powerful, some challenges still remain to be resolved in order to make the Web fully support the matching of research outcomes competences to industrial needs. The most appealing of those challenges impose the questions of going beyond expertise – finding competent people from unexpected domains; finding a tradeoff between data accessibility and privacy; and finding a way to automatically match patents to emerging industry needs.