VŠE Appears in the European Commission’s Innovation Radar for the First Time
The outcome of the research project Onto-DESIDE, in which a team from the Prague University of Economics and Business also participated, has been included in the European Commission’s Innovation Radar. VŠE is listed for the innovation The Circular Economy Ontology Network as one of the key innovators, together with Linköping University and Ragn-Sells Recycling.
This marks VŠE’s first representation on the Innovation Radar platform, which highlights innovations with potential for further use in practice. Innovation Radar is used by the European Commission to identify innovations and innovators emerging from research and innovation projects funded by the European Union. The VŠE team, led by ontology engineering experts Ondřej Zamazal and Vojtěch Svátek, contributed to the international consortium its experience with ontology mapping and transformation, i.e. methods that make it possible to connect and adapt different systems of concepts and data structures.
“In the Onto-DESIDE project, we focused on one of the main obstacles to the development of the circular economy: the difficult exchange and linking of data between different organisations, sectors and information systems. As part of the solution, we worked on a way of describing and interlinking data so that it is understandable to both people and machines,” Zamazal explains.
In terms of market maturity, Innovation Radar classifies the innovation in the Exploring category, i.e. as a solution that is still in the phase of verifying its further use on the market. “We greatly appreciate being included in Innovation Radar, not only because of ourselves, but also because it demonstrates how ontology engineering techniques are increasingly in demand across various sectors of practice. A substantial part of the credit for this recognition, of course, goes to the project coordinator Eva Blomqvist and her team. A key moment was already the fact that our colleagues from Linköping University invited us to join the project, which was already under way, on the basis of our previous research. At the same time, we are pleased that the bilateral cooperation between our teams continues even after the end of the Onto-DESIDE project,” Svátek comments.
According to the assessment by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the innovation directly responds to the real needs of existing markets and customers. Further insights into the project and the role of ontologies in the circular economy are provided by Vojtěch Svátek and Ondřej Zamazal in an interview for VědaVýzkum.cz: Vojtěch Svátek and Ondřej Zamazal: Ontologies Support Flexible Data Exchange – Something the Circular Economy Also Needs