When establishing the calls for proposals, funding is earmarked for key priorities and research areas (the highest level of classification being Energy and/or Transport). The main motivation of the current exercise was to determine relationships between funding and the various activities of the Joint Undertaking, for example to visualise trends in the funding for particular technologies or applications.
As a pre-cursor to a wider historical analysis of the impact of the FCH 2 JU, a structured classification of projects according to keywords has been performed, leading to the creation of a hierarchical database. All projects up to and including the 2018 call have been included in this exercise, excluding two additional projects under preparation by FCH JU, which were not signed in time for inclusion in this report.
To achieve these goals, keywords were determined for all projects and then distributed within a hierarchical database created. Keywords were analysed based on Project Topic (encompassing the technology type and application) and Project Class (encompassing the stage and scale of the project undertaken). Finally, a series of plots were created, demonstrating how the database could be used to investigate the trends in funding at different levels of the database hierarchy.
The constructed keyword hierarchy was applied in the Programme Review days (PRD) Panels to define the allocation of projects. The database can also provide useful supporting data to the historical analyses, which are aiming to determine the overall impact of the FCH 2 JU activities since its inception.
The report was prepared in 2019. However, the classification of projects using this methodology is continuously updated. The final registered version of the deliverable Keyword Analysis and Project Classification of FCH 2 JU Projects: An Overview of the Methodology Plus Selected Data is available here.