The Pandia team is going to Seville, Spain, next week, to take part in a seminar arranged by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), a Joint Research Centre under the European Commission.

There is actually great interest in search in European innovation policy circles. This is partly because of its great socio-economic role.

Search is a growing forward looking industry in its own right. Moreover, it has been shaping the world around us in a profound way, which brings up questions regarding learning, innovation, social equality, privacy and more.

Given the clout the Commission has regarding competition and privacy issues, American owned search giants like Google are acutely aware of the need to communicate their views to the Europeans.

At the seminar, called “Socio-Economic Challenges of Search”, IPTS has asked various experts to debate topics like:

• New and disruptive and groundbreaking applications
• The interaction between search and the social web
• Competition in the search engine industry
• Context-aware search
• Mobile search
• Search engines and the citizen
• Search engines and journalism and media policy
• Privacy challenges
• and more

We have produced two position papers — one on Web 2.0 and one on privacy issues — which will share with you next week. We also plan to give you some highlights from the discussion.