A team from Sheffield Hallam University working on web data search technology has secured €370,000 in funding from the European Commission.

The funding is part of a €4m collaborative project lead by business software firm 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.

The Communication and Computing Research Centre (CCRC) at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) is committed to research in the areas of computing and communication.

Dr Simon Polovina, senior lecturer in enterprise computing, said,“Semantic technology will be the next big breakthrough for the world wide web and will better enable computers and people to work in cooperation.

“This project, called 'Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST)', will focus on creating new visual tools to help businesses make sense of the vast amounts of data that is out there."