The boards of governors of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University have approved a framework agreement that allows for a structural and far-reaching cooperation between both institutions. An Alliance research group brings together at least 6 researchers from UGent and from VUB (and possibly also from their association partners). These researchers are active around a common research line.

Within the context of the Alliance Research Group we want to work on the study of declarative formalisms that are scalable to the level of web applications. By restricting the expression of formalism to what is required effectively, sometimes surprisingly efficient systems can be found. For example, we want to investigate what conditions the PageRank algorithm, used by Google to estimate the quality of webpages, can provide comprehensive ward for vague answer set programming. We also want to draw on a theoretically responsible methodology for obtaining useful, vague knowledge banks from web information. This includes the development of an operational definition of membership rates for this context, as well as techniques to determine a meaningful consensus from conflicting input data, so that more credible sources play a greater impact (eg based on social choice theory). It is our intention to use this for extracting protein interaction networks from biomedical literature.