Leibniz Universität Hannover – L3S Research Center

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Founded in 1831, Leibniz Universität Hannover (www.uni-hannover.de) is one of the nine leading Institutes of Technology in Germany (TU 9) with around 23.500 students. More than 2.600 academics and scientists work in nine faculties with around 160 departments and institutes. The L3S Research Center is a joint research institute of several universities in Lower Saxony, Germany formally associated with Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH). Work at L3S focuses on innovative and cutting-edge methods and technologies for Web Science, a key topic for the European Information Society, investigating the Future of Information and Communication in the Web Age. Projects investigate innovative scenarios and solutions in the Web Science areas of Web Search (especially Entity-centric search), Web Information Management (including semantic technologies), Middleware for Web Infrastructures (including Security), the Future Internet and the Web of People (including Personalization and Social Web solutions). The L3S team builds upon technologies and approaches from various areas such as information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, Semantic Web technologies, data management, and Distributed Information Systems. LUH investigates the topics Web Archive and Social Web analysis, diversity and temporal aspects in information, metadata management, event-centric, entity-centric and privacy preserving information access to information in the context of various European and national projects like the ERC Advanced Grant Alexandria, or the projects Cubrik, Qualimaster, ARCOMEM or LivingKnowledge. The Institute for Legal Informatics (IRI), being part of LUH’s School of Law and member of L3S, was established in 1983 and is the first Institute dedicated to scientific research on all issues of Information and Communication Technologies at a German University. With currently more than 50 people staff IRI is one of Europe’s largest institutions in the field and is actively involved in about 10 European research projects with a focus on data protection, data security and intellectual property. Nikolaus Forgó has been leading IRI in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Metzger since 2008.

Role in SoBigData: 
LUH will lead the JRA in WP8 on building the big data ecosystem, in order to enrich the SoBigData RI with new data through analytical crawling methods. This builds on the Alexandria infrastructure, which will be integrated and offered both through transnational and virtual access. LUH will also be involved in WP2, building on their expertise in legal informatics. In particular, they will lead T2.4 Intellectual property and data ownership framework. In WP9 they will work on enhancing the SoBigData RI with text mining methods, whereas in WP11 they will contribute with datasets and protocols for evaluating analytical crawling and engaging with the community around this challenge. Also training, community building, and innovation activities in this area.
Infrastructure brought into SoBigData: 
LUH contributes the Alexandria infrastructure to the project that consists of 10 Nodes and 80 cores with 10GB per core. The cluster has gross storage capacity of 720 TB (net 261 TB). It comprises a Hadoop cluster with tools for indexing, accessing, and analyzing large Web corpora. In particular, the German Web corpus covers all Web pages of the .de domain from 1996 – 2013 originally crawled by the Internet Archive (approx.. 80TB). The infrastructure also provided virtual access via the AlexandriaCloud.
Principal Investigator: 
Wolfgang Nejdl
Country: 
Germany