Abstract Web search is a crucial technology for the digital economy. Dominated by a few gatekeepers focused on commercial success, however, web publishers have to optimize their content for these gatekeepers, resulting in a closed ecosystem of search engines as well as the risk of publishers sacrificing quality. To encourage an open search ecosystem and offer users genuine choice among alternative search engines, we propose the development of an Open Web Index (OWI). We outline six core principles for developing and maintaining an open index, based on open data principles, legal compliance, and collaborative technology development. The combination of an open index with what we call declarative search engines will facilitate the development of vertical search engines and innovative web data products (including, e.g., large language models), enabling a fair and open information space. This framework underpins the EU‐funded project OpenWebSearch.EU, marking the first step towards realizing an Open Web Index.

In this poster contribution, we present a scheduling system for automated remote operation of instruments at high-altitude research facilities and similar remote sites. Via web-based interfaces, the system allows instrument owners as well as authorized third-party scientists to schedule and execute measurements and observations.The system has been developed as a thesis project in the context of the AlpEnDAC-II ("Alpine Environmental Data Analysis Centre", www.alpendac.eu) collaboration (funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Consumer Protection). Consequently, the scheduler and interfaces have been integrated with the AlpEnDAC Operating-on-Demand functionalities. A first use case for the framework has been the operation of an airglow imager (FAIM) in Oberpfaffenhofen (DE).We describe the design and implementation of our system for scheduling and execution of multi-user observations on instruments, including scheduling-data transfers and data retrieval. Our core implementation uses an optimization-based scheduler (Google’s OR-Tools) to ensure maximum instrument use and to minimize idle times. Results show that the scheduler is reliable, fast, and is consistently able to provide optimal observation plans. The extensibility of the system is guaranteed by the usage of modern software in the core of the system, including well-defined and specified communication through REST APIs. Thus, it can easily be adapted to other settings and instruments, which is also facilitated by a modern deployment strategy using Docker and Kubernetes.

In citizen science, citizens are encouraged to participate in research, with web technologies promoting location-independent participation and broad knowledge sharing. In this study, web technologies were extracted from 112 citizen science projects listed on the “Bürger schaffen Wissen”. Four indicators on web technologies—Online platforms, Educational tools, Social media, and Data sharing between projects—were chosen to quantify the extent to which web technologies are used within citizen science projects. The results show that the use of web technologies is already very well established in both the natural and social science projects and only the possibilities for data sharing between projects are limited.