Aid to regional development agencies: finding and matching research funding opportunities

Regional development agencies are confronted with a plethora of research funding programs that provide opportunities for regional research groups and SMEs. This paper describes the practical benefits and technological building blocks of an online matching service of research profiles with funding opportunities. It gives an overview of the infrastructure for data sourcing and processing based on a scalable cloud computing platform. It then describes how data is consolidated, analyzed, and interlinked so as to facilitate the finding and matching of funding opportunities. Integrating concepts and themes with those available as Linked Open Data (LOD) adds value to finding and matching by interlinking results with publicly available data resources, and to improve search performance for related content on the internet. In order to optimize matching, the paper describes the user-profiling capabilities based on statistical analyses and machine learning. The paper concludes by discussing the lessons learned so far as well as possible extensions into other application areas.