A team from Sheffield Hallam University working on data search technology that has the power to change the World Wide Web has secured €370,000 funding from the European Commission with help from Enterprise Europe Yorkshire.

The funding is part of a €4m collaborative project lead by German technology leaders, SAP, that will focus on how improved data searching will impact on business.

Dubbed the ‘Semantic Web’ by father of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the next generation of the World Wide Web will allow users to search more data than ever before, return more relevant results and save users time surfing the web.

Currently only a proportion of data posted on the Internet can be ‘read’ intelligently by computers and users have to visit multiple websites to find the information that they want.

The project will develop methodologies and a platform that combines essential features of semantic technologies and business intelligence.