A semantic journey to discover research and innovation opportunities in Europe

As the amount of information which becomes available to users grows, finding condensed sets of useful information becomes more difficult. The manual evaluation and discovery for content valuable to individual users needs thus grows in conjunction with the size of the dataset. Ideally, providing as condensed set of accurate information as possible results in a significant increase in user productivity and with decreased mental effort. While this concept of information foraging has been in the literature since the 1990´s, its application to specific information domains has proven to be of a continual challenge. In this paper we examine the process of global matchmaking across the whole spectrum of activities between research development, innovation. As a concrete example, we investigate the European Research Area and introduce a three tiered search approach embedded in a tool called The Opportunity Finder, which increases the ease of finding matches in a user friendly and intuitive manner.