The Web has proved to be an unprecedented success for facilitating the publication, use and exchange of information, at planetary scale, on virtually every topic, and representing an amazing diversity of opinions, viewpoints, mind sets and backgrounds. Its design principles and core technological components have lead to an unprecedented growth and mass collaboration. This trend is also finding increasing adoption in business environments. Nevertheless, the Web is also confronted with fundamental challenges with respect to the purposeful access, processing and management of these sheer amounts of information, whilst remaining true to its principles, and leveraging the diversity inherently unfolding through world wide scale collaboration.

RENDER will engage with these challenges by developing methods, techniques, software and data sets that will leverage diversity as a crucial source of innovation and creativity, whilst providing enhanced support for feasibly managing data at very large scale, and for designing novel algorithms that reflect diversity in the ways information is selected, ranked, aggregated, presented and used. RENDER’s information management solution will scale to very large amounts of data and hundreds of thousands of users, but also to a plurality of points of views and opinions. This will be demonstrated through the usage of realistic data sources, including news streams covering over 5000 sources worldwide with 100,000 items per day, (micro) blog streams adding up to more than a million posts per day, a full data stream from Wikipedia, and the Linked Open Data Cloud; through open source extensions to popular communication and collaboration platforms such as MediaWiki and WordPress; and through three high-profile case studies.

RENDER will help to realize a world where information is acquired and shared in a fundamentally different manner than the consensual approach promoted by movements such as Web 2.0, and where communication and collaboration across the borders of social, cultural or professional communities are truly enabled via advanced Web technology, supporting one of the credos of European society: “United in diversity”.