Long time ago, later GSIS Members started to promote the endeavour to integrate knowledge in the field of the general study of information and systems as a basis for the constitution of a truly global and sustainable information society. As result of these undertakings, several international scientific gatherings were organised by them, for instance, the second Conference on Foundations of Information Science held in 1996 in Vienna. In the following decade, our association was founded under the name of Unified Theory of Information Research Group, which clearly manifests the intention to integrate knowledge in the field of information. It was by the end of past decade, when several UTI Members envisaged the establishment of an encyclopaedic work in the broad field of information and systems. This project idea, supported by a number of international organisations and scientists, has been aimed at resuming several international ventures which by the time had already developed a valuable corpus of conceptual elucidation materials published in various encyclopaedic volumes and editions of different nature. In order to fulfil this long-term undertaking, in 2018 a consortium of several international academic and scientific organisations from Europe and South America was formed by UTI Group Member José María Díaz Nafría, representative of the Madrid Open University from Spain, and Teresa Guarda, representative of the Universidad Estatal Península de Santa Elena in Ecuador, that applied for funding. Eventually, funding was granted by the Santa Elena Institute of Science and Technological Development (Ecuador) for the project to be carried out in a two-years-term, starting this spring.

Thus, this project is the first one funded in which the present Institute for a Global Sustainable Information Society is involved. José María Díaz Nafría and Teresa Guarda are the overall Co-ordinators.

The photo above shows Santa Elena Bay at the North of the homonymous Península where the Universidad Estatal Península de Santa Elena is situated; the hill on the horizon is at Puntilla Cape, the westernmost point of continental Ecuador.

The ultimate objective of glossaLAB, perfectly aligned with GSIS aims, points at developing the capacities for the integration of scientific and social knowledge, and the consequent ability to confront global complex problems through interdisciplinary approaches, resources for conceptual elucidation, interdisciplinary co-creation of knowledge and quality assessment of the integrated knowledge.

glossaLAB project is included in the international PRIMER initiative, in which GSIS is also involved, aimed at developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary capacities to confront complex problems of social concern. The initiative named after Promoting Interdisciplinary Methodologies in Education and Research and the polysemic meanings of PRIMER, pursues the development of an postgraduate education programme for researchers linked to open data labs, for which several international proposals have been submitted to European and Latin American funding bodies. glossaLAB is going to be the first PRIMER open data lab to be carried out.

glossaLAB consortium is constituted by the following research institutions: Universidad Estatal Península de Santa Elena (Ecuador), Madrid Open University (Spain), the former UTI Research Group (Austria), BITrum – Grupo de investigación (Spain), Universidad de León (España), Institut für Design Science München (Germany), International Society for the Study of Information (Austria), Yachay University of Technology (Ecuador), Universidad Politécnica Salesiana (Ecuador).