In AI4Green, the latest program for research funding in Austria managed by the FFG, MODUL Technology is excited to begin a new funded project called SDG-HUB in which it will build a Knowledge Graph for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Austria.

Having started in May 2022, the three-year project’s goal is to support Austria’s achievement of the SDGs of the Agenda 2030 through building a knowledge repository with AI-based semantic search and visualization capabilities. The repository will offer concrete insights into citizen and stakeholder perceptions via monitoring of the online discourse as well as measure progress towards achieving the Agenda 2030 and Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation via online data ingestion and analysis. Through a better understanding of the social mood and environmental indicators, national research and scientific communities will be enabled to communicate more effectively to citizens about both proper and improper behavior and contribute to measurable improvements in achieving climate and sustainability goals in Austria.

Together with the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG), the Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA), the University of Innsbruck as well as project coordinator and long-time collaborator webLyzard technology, MODUL Technology provides competencies in Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction (AKGC), Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and relation extraction (Slot Filling). These will be used to build an SDG-HUB Knowledge Graph that provides disambiguated identities for all concepts that form part of the SDG discussion (particularly national and regional concepts that would be missing from global graphs such as DBPedia or Wikidata). Complemented by facts extracted from online sources about each concept, the SDG-HUB Knowledge Graph will support a sophisticated understanding of the online discourse and social mood around problems and solutions for meeting Austria’s climate and sustainability goals.

We hope this to be the first of many projects for MODUL University’s research centre to build domain-specific and national/regional Knowledge Graphs for different purposes. MODUL Technology can apply the same technologies and methodologies – plus lessons learnt in SDG-HUB – to support its future knowledge extraction and modelling work.

MODUL Technology : https://www.modultech.eu

SDG-HUB project: http://www.sdghub.at

Contact: Asst.-Prof. Dr Lyndon Nixon, nixon@modultech.eu