Users on Twitter are sending 200 million Tweets per day. Almost 50 hours of video are uploaded per minute on Youtube. Knowledge is hidden in Petabytes of scientific data. We are in the middle of a data explosion that confronts society with new questions and that challenges many dimensions of computer science research. How can users find relevant and compact information in a flood of speech, photo, video and text data?

There is a significant need for models, methods and techniques that allow us to access, organize, manage and search this avalanche of information, and present it to the end-user. The expertise of CWI in this field is applied in the domain of cultural heritage, open data, marine biology and geo-spatial and scientific databases.

Research groups at CWI participate in national programs and EU projects that are carried out in collaboration with a large number of industry and research partners such as Beeld en Geluid, ANP, TNO, Rijksmuseum, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg and the National Applied Research Laboratories (Taiwan).