NuAGES

The Internet Memory Research foundation in Paris is home to Europe's most sophisticated web archiving technology. On the other side of La Manche the applicant's team at the University of Sheffield develop a world-leading infrastructure for text processing -- GATE, a General Architecture for Text Engineering (http://gate.ac.uk/). In 2011 the challenges posed by social and networked media are ever more prominent -- witness the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks and the exponential growth of Twitter, Facebook and the like. How can our social institutions aggregate consensus in this context? How can formal journalism function? How does a company relate to its customers when their views are expressed in a terabyte of impenetrable text? How can scientists exploit the publications mountain to improve their models? This ANR project will integrate and extend the state-of-the-art in web crawling and text analysis to advance the technological answers to these social, economic and scientific questions. The results will be available as open source software: a New cloud Architecture for General Extraction Services (NuAGES). As a result French R&D will gain: * a center of excellence in cloud-based web analysis * privileged access to state-of-the-art text processing computations running on a large data platform * showcase demonstrations of new research and industrial applications in the areas of o cancer research (with the WHO's IARC laboratory in Lyon) o public on-demand crawl/analyse/index services (from Internet Memory in Paris)