July 2025 - Open Search Foundation

“Imagine, our streets would have no names and our houses no readable house numbers. Just a cryptic code readable only by machines.”

Dr. Stefan Voigt, Chairman of the OSF Board, explains the mission of the Open Search Foundation and the goal of the Open Web Index project in an interview for the Polish web blog HomoDigital.

He goes into more detail about the challenges and the great importance of the project in current political, social and technological context.

“So one of the main challenges is to inspire people and computing providers to cooperate on this large but socially extremely relevant task and to jointly make public information publicly accessible and usable again.”

Dr. Stefan Voigt is optimistic about a possible paradigm shift away from the current market concentration of large tech companies on the Internet.

The full interview is available on HomoDigital (in Polish) here.

The annual International Open Search Symposium #ossym will take place for the seventh time in a row in 2025. From 8 to 10 October, #ossym25 invites the open search community to travel to Helskinki/Finland to participate in the 3-day long interdisciplinary forum at this year’s event partner CSC – IT Center for Science or online.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on classic web search and AI

As every year, the #ossym brings together experts from a wide array of fields such as computer science, law & regulation, ethics, business, politics and society. The seventh International Open Search Symposium provides a forum for innovating ideas regarding open and distributed web search as well as its use cases. The focus will be on artificial intelligence (AI), search applications and technologies, legal and ethical aspects of open web search as well as topics relating to information exploitation/media literacy.

Keynotes on data governance and knowledge management

Viivi Lähteenoja is Chief Executuve Officer at MyData Company and gives impulses on the topic of data governance.

Harri Ketamo is founder and CEO of Headai and will speak on “The openness of knowledge data and its role in Future Search Solutions”.

Scientific sessions on the topic of “Architecture & Infrastructure”

Two science tracks on the topic of “Architecture & Infrastructure” will deal with the extraction of structured data from the Open Web Index, data storage structures for the URL Frontier in OpenWebSearch.eu, and the extraction of geodata from semi-structured data with the help of LLMs. Additionally, Common Crawl offers insights into the coverage of diverse European language and cultural content.

Application tracks on “Retrieval Augmented Generation & Large Language Models”

Decentralized approaches for accessing information via browser-agentic web as well as the fusion of retrieval, grammar and decision trees for text generation will be presented and discussed.

Search Engine Tracks remain an integral part of the #ossym conferences

A popular #ossym tradition are the Search Engine Tracks, which focus on alternative search engines and their areas of application. Already confirmed this year are fragFinn.de and searchmysite.net.

Ethics, law and society

Non-technical topics such as societal interests and special needs search solutions will round up the program and will provide exciting food for thought.

Information and Registration

The Finnish Supercomputing Center CSC – IT Center for Science offers around 100 on-site seats.

All information on registration and tickets can be found at:
https://opensearchfoundation.org/en/events-osf/ossym25/

The Open Search Foundation e. V. is a European movement that creates the basis for independent, free and self-determined access to information on the Internet. In cooperation with research institutions, data centers and other partners, we are committed to a web search that benefits everyone.  True to the motto: “Together for a better net”.

Contact :
Open Search Foundation e.V. – OSF

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