  WDAqua is a Marie Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) and is funded under
EU grant number 642795 and runs from January 2015 to December 2018. WDAqua aims
at advancing the state of the art by intertwining training, research and
innovation efforts, centered around one service: data-driven question
answering. Question answering is immediately useful to a wide audience of end
users, and we will demonstrate this in settings including e-commerce, public
sector information, publishing and smart cities. Question answering also covers
web science and data science broadly, leading to transferrable research results
and to transferrable skills of the researchers who have finished our training
programme. To ensure that our research improves question answering overall,
every individual research project connects at least two of these steps.
Intersectional secondments (within a consortium covering academia, research
institutes and industrial research as well as network-wide workshops, R and D
challenges and innovation projects further balance ground-breaking research and
the needs of society and industry. Training-wise these offers equip early stage
researchers with the expertise and transferable technical and non-technical
skills that will allow them to pursue a successful career as an academic,
decision maker, practitioner or entrepreneur.
