Friends find funding
ontoforce is a Belgian start-up founded in 2011, that has been actively promoting Open Knowledge. The aim of ontoforce is to use this technology in order to increase efficiency in global research into medicinal products. The start-up also offers consultancy services, and supports socially committed projects such as schoolKID, a working group within OKFN Belgium on Open Education.
Ontoforce, the company behind our open education working group “schoolKID”, just raised € 1 million from LRM (Limburgse Reconversiemaatschappij), SOFI and iMinds. Ontoforce developed a semantic search engine (disQover), that markets to the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, but is also open to other markets. disQover is a user-friendly search engine that establishes smart links between different autonomous sources of information: your own databases, databases of other departments or companies within your concern, external sources such as the internet, social media and so on. In short: disQover connects internal, private data with external, public information.
Ontoforce intends to use disQover within the Belgian OKFN chapter to further increase the potential and use of open government data in many sectors, realising a bigger economic impact within consumer-driven sectors of the economy.