Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

RE-SEARCH ALPS, a European project coordinated by Unimore, submits the results after one year since its onset

RE-SEARCH ALPS - Research Laboratories in the Alpine Area, a European project coordinated by Unimore and aimed at building a massive database for mapping the laboratories and research centres of the Alpine macro area, takes stock by officially submitting its progress after approximately one year since its onset, as it did on the 51st OECD Meeting of the Technology and Innovation Policy Working Party, which was held in Paris during the update session on OECD countries.

After a year of work, the group operating in for RESEARCH-ALPS, a consortium that sees the participation of Unimore, the University of Milan, MIUR, the French Ministry of Education, and the French company Sidertrade, has created a Beta version of the web platform, with the data relating to laboratories and Italian and French research centres, and has organised a dataset that already includes about 70,000 organisations and 60,000 innovation projects.

Professor Francesco Guerra of DIEF – Enzo Ferrari Department of Engineering of Unimore - is in charge of the scientific aspect of the project, and has the task to coordinate the IT aspects through programming a software designed to collect, recognise, and systemise such a wide quantity of data, together with professor Margherita Russo of DEMB – Marco Biagi Department of Economics of Unimore, committed to identify the different categories of organisations that are active in the field of research and collected data modelling.

The system that has been implemented so far, which is available at the address  http://researchalps.data-publica.com , is a small part of what in June 2019 aims at being a massive transnational tool, the first in Europe of its kind for the completeness and quantity of information, for mapping – we believe - over 250 thousand realities dealing with scientific research and innovation in the territories involved in the project: Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, and Lichtenstein, as well as 48 regions of the macro-regional European strategy for the Alpine region EUSALP .

Until today, the main and more complex work that researchers have dealt with has been the definition of standards for recognising and interpreting the data, and their subsequent integration. As a matter of fact, for each country involved, the criteria defining what a research centre is and what its peculiar purpose is, without forgetting the complexity arising from the several sources where useful data are collected (Ministries, universities, private companies, existing databases, but only on a national basis or limited by sector).

During this year of activity, researchers have created the profile of tens of thousands of both Italian and French, public and private research centres, starting with something like fifteen sources, by extracting and processing the items to create a single dataset of information.

RE-SEARCH ALPS is willing to help bring together and promote dialogue between research and manufacturing, companies and scientific laboratories, by providing a comprehensive overview of the operators in the various research and development fields, through the identification of their activities and peculiarities, in order to make them available to companies in search for ideas and innovative solutions. A project focused on stimulating and strengthening the dialogue and contaminations between research and enterprises, within an international network, by fostering cooperation between companies, universities and laboratories.

Also data relating to Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Lichtenstein will be completely mapped from December 2018 until the end of the project. The data collected will also be used by the EUSALP Platform of Knowledge, a tool by EUSALP that is available to all interested users, with free access through presentation sheets or a 3D map of the Alpine macro area.

“Mapping the organisations involved in research and development activities – professor Margherita Russo of Unimore proclaims - has a great value in supporting the creation of an eco-system that promotes innovation, as these are the companies that help foster the development and growth of a territory”. Professor Francesco Guerra of Unimore adds that “the project represents a challenge from a technological point of view, as we need to distinguish and integrate the data coming from several different open data sources, with information taken from websites, even in different languages”.

Categorie: International - english