The ZHAW is one of the leading universities of applied sciences in Switzerland. Teaching, research, continuing education, consulting and other services are both scientifically based and practice-oriented. One of the major strengths of ZHAW is that the majority of applied research projects are at the intersection of academia and industry by having a strong participation of industry partners as the drivers for these projects. Graduates of the ZHAW hold their own on national and international markets and in the intercultural working world. Students benefit from an internationally oriented university that places a special focus not only on conveying practical and specialist competencies, but also on developing social and personal skills. The eight Schools of the ZHAW cover a broad range of subjects: Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering, Health Professions, Applied Linguistics, Life Sciences and Facility Management, Applied Psychology, Social Work, Engineering, and Management and Law. About 11,100 students are enrolled in 26 Bachelor’s and 13 Master’s degree programs. The ZHAW also offers a wide variety of continuing education programs in many areas and thus serves as a partner for life-long learning. There are some 40 Master of Advanced Studies programs, over 150 Diploma and Certificate programs and various continuing education courses. The ZHAW is one of the largest universities of applied sciences in Switzerland and thus  offers a wide range of specialist knowledge. All of its Schools carry out disciplinary and interdisciplinary research.

The “Athena” Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies (ATHENA RC) is a research and technology body, which was founded under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Development in 2001. Athena RC participates in the project through its Information Management Systems Institute (IMSI). IMSI was founded in 2007, with the mission to conduct research in the areas of data management and large-scale information systems. In this small time-frame, IMSI has been established as one of the leading Research Institutes in the EU in Big Data and Semantic Web technologies, i.e. the foundations of the Data Economy. This is apparent in the quantity and quality of scientific publications in these fields, as well as from the success in obtaining competitive funding from EU and national programmes. More than 90% of IMSI budget comes from competitive funding (about 30 active research and development projects). The key personnel of IMSI have a long and pertinent experience in participating in and leading EU projects with an emphasis on topics for Big Data management, Cloud technologies, Open Data, and e-Infrastructures.

Fraunhofer is Europe’s largest application-oriented research organization geared to people’s needs in health, security, communication, energy, and the environment. More than 80 institutes in Germany and the world employed more than 26,000 research and administration personnel in 2016, with a research budget of more than €2 billion. The Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD is one of the world‘s leading institutes for applied research in visual computing. The Fraunhofer researchers in Darmstadt, Rostock, Graz and Singapore are turning images into information and extracting information from images. Prototypes and integrated solutions are developed in accordance with customized requirements. The research and design projects are directly related to current economic issues.
For almost 15 years, Fraunhofer IGD has contributed to research in visual analytics, leading to significant transfer of results to commerce, industry, and the public. Fraunhofer IGD was coordinator of the European project VisMaster, building a Europe-wide community of industry and academia in visual analytics. One particular focus point in the past was the area of text analytics and visualization of text repositories, which will play a major role in this proposed project. Fraunhofer IGD significantly contributes to the development of European and international standards. The institute supports industry, commerce, and the public in designing, evaluating, and developing secure, human-centric solutions of the future.

SIRIS Academic is an SME providing strategic consultancy for higher education, research and innovation actors: universities and research organizations, as well as regional and national governments and institutions in charge of policy setting. As a knowledge-intensive company, we provide such actors with evidence-based advice, analysis and tools to support their development and improve decision-making. Our capacity to provide a top-level service depends on our robust and thorough domain expertise: extensive knowledge on the higher education and research (HE&R) and public policy sector, of its trends, constraints, evolutions worldwide, as well as of regional  specificities (e.g. organization structure of HE& R institutions, missions and priorities, research funding strategies, pedagogic innovation, internationalization, etc.). We provide an innovative service for HE&R and public policy sector that combines in depth qualitative knowledge with cutting-edge use of data technology.

With it’s more than 80 individual institutes, the Max-Planck society ranks highly amongst the worldwide highest scientific impact research institutes and Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) is one of the worldwide leading institutions in observational space and ground based Astronomy. For their astrophysical research, the MPE scientists measure the radiation of far away objects in different wavelengths areas: from millimetere/sub-millimetre and infared all the way to X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths. These methods span more than twelve decades of the electromagnetic spectrum. The research topics pursued at MPE range from the physics of cosmic plasmas and of stars to the physics and chemistry of interstellar matter, from star formation and nucleosynthesis to extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology in different wavelengths areas: from millimetere/sub-millimetre and infrared all the way to X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths.

Infili Technologies Private Company (Infili) is a research intensive SME that utilizes a unique combination of high-end technologies as an outcome of many years of R&D experience and is structured around a pool of highly qualified and motivated engineers with expertise in international projects. The company is designing solutions for vertical industries with diverse and very demanding requirements regarding the exploitation of their information and knowledge repositories. Infili focuses in Software development, Data Mining, PM and Consulting services by utilizing market standards such as PRINCE2 and ISO 9001. Security ISO 27001 guidelines are followed in deploying solutions and handling third party information data. Infili offers a variety of services, such as Enterprise IT systems, Information Security / ISO 27001 / COBIT, Project Management in deployment projects, Research & Development in the areas of Semantic Web, AI, opinion mining.

CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) is a government-funded research organization under the responsibility of the French Ministry of research. With 33000 persons, 1144 research units spread throughout France. CNRS is the largest research organization in Europe. It carries out research in all scientific fields of knowledge. CNRS promotes interdisciplinary research to improve knowledge, ensure economic and technological development, and solve complex societal needs. Its budget amounts to 3,309 billion Euros. Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG) is one of the largest laboratories in Computer Science in France. It is structured as a Joint Research Center (French Unité Mixte de Recherche – UMR) founded by the following institutions,  CNRS, Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP), INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, Grenoble Alpes University. LIG has 500 members (faculty, full-time researchers, PhD students, administrative and technical staff) who contribute to the development of fundamental aspects of Computer Science (models, languages, methodologies, algorithms) and address conceptual, technological, and societal challenges. LIG contributes to increasing diversity and dynamism of data, services, interaction devices, and use cases influence the evolution of software and systems so they need to guarantee essential properties such as reliability, performance, autonomy, and adaptability.

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.sib.swiss) is an academic not-for-profit foundation, recognized of public utility which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. The Institute includes some 80 world-class research and service groups that bring together over 800 researchers in the fields of proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary bioinformatics, modelling, imaging, biophysics and population genetics in several major cities in Switzerland. SIB’s expertise is widely appreciated, and its infrastructure and bioinformatics resources are used by life science researchers worldwide.
In particular, SIB is internationally renowned for bioinformatics knowledge bases that serve the life and medical sciences community world-wide. Among these knowledge bases are UniProtKB, STRING, SWISS-MODEL, Bgee, OMA etc. All of these resources are linked on ExPASy.org, SIB’s Bioinformatics Resources Portal, which provides a RESTful, high-level interface to query SIB’s databases.

The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (UNIBZ) is a small university in northern Italy, that is unique due to its trilingualism in teaching and research, its high level of internationalization as well as an ideal study environment guaranteed by its excellent facilities. UNIBZ has been ranked by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 as the 9th best university worldwide among small universities. According to the same ranking, it is also ranked among the 150 best universities worldwide in Computer Science. The Faculty of Computer Science at UNIBZ will participate in the INODE project through the Research Centre for Knowledge and Data (KRDB), comprising around 30 researchers, and internationally recognized as a leader in foundational and applied research on knowledge representation and data management. KRDB has strong expertise in reasoning and query answering over lightweight and expressive ontologies, and in data and information integration. The key expertise for INODE are techniques and technologies for ontology-based data access and integration (OBDA). Ontop is a state-of-the-art OBDA system currently at TRL8, developed at UNIBZ and released as open-source. It supports all relevant W3C standards and it can interface to all major commercial and free RDBMSs. Ontop had around 6000 downloads in the last year, and has already been adopted in major industrial settings. Current research on OBDA concerns the development of foundational results on query processing over novel kinds of data sources, including tree-structured data (JSON), temporally annotated data, and geospatial data.