The growing digitisation and networking process within our society has a large influence on all aspects of everyday life. Large amounts of data are being produced permanently, and when these are analysed and interlinked they have the potential to create new knowledge and intelligent solutions for the economy and society. Big data can make important contributions to the technical progress in our key societal sectors and help shape business. What is needed are innovative technologies, strategies and competencies for the beneficial use of big data to address societal needs.

Climate, Energy, Food, Health, Transport, Security, and Social Sciences – are the most important societal challenges tackled by the European Union within the new research and innovation framework programme “Horizon 2020”. In every one of these fields, the processing, analysis and integration of large amounts of data plays a growing role – such as the analysis of medical data, the decentralised supply with renewable energies or the optimisation of traffic flow in large cities.

BigDataEurope (BDE) will undertake the foundational work for enabling European companies to build innovative multilingual products and services based on semantically interoperable, large-scale, multi-lingual data assets and knowledge, available under a variety of licenses and business models.

The Role of CESSDA in the BDE project:

• To coordinate the Societal Challenge 6 Interest Group: “Europe in a changing world - Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies”, and potential users of big data in the fields of social sciences and humanities (SSH).
• To build this interest group, collect its requirements, assist the building of an ICT big data infrastructure access point for SSH, explore and evaluate the input data, and discover the implications for the future of big data in SSH.

Eighteen project partners were involved in the project.

NOTE: The project's former website is no longer associated with the project or its participants.

Disclaimer: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 644564 - BigDataEurope.