Mission

What

Establish an interdisciplinary, sustainable European community of researchers, helping organizations to expose their data on the Web in a useful way.

Why

PlanetData drives forward the state‐of‐the‐art in large‐scale data management and its application to create useful, open data sets. This is motivated by

1. the increasing reliance of business on large public data; 
2. the uptake of open data principles in many vertical sectors, most notably eGovernment, for public or social good, to increase the efficiency of end‐user services and enable novel business models; and
3. the need of research communities to make sense out of petabytes of scientific data, to describe and expose this data in ways that encourage and enable collaboration.

Research questions relevant to large‐scale data management are inherently interdisciplinary; their durable resolution requires the building of bridges between the different research communities that currently exist in isolation from each other.

How

By conducting interdisciplinary research on

1. the Web‐friendly representation, robust integration, and scalable transmission, processing, and management of stream‐like data, such as sensors, news stories, and microblog entries;
2. the assessment and improvement of the quality of large open data sets of various modalities, and the augmentation of these data sets with self‐descriptive metadata giving an account of quality and contextual aspects; and
3. the accountable usage of Web‐based data sets taking into consideration provenance, privacy, trust, and access rights.

By applying this research to real‐world data sets to derive best practices and guidelines for organizations owning or providing large amounts of data online. By building definitive vocabularies and assembling a catalogue of useful data sets complemented by software tools that support the data provisioning process. By providing world‐class technology, supporting relational, RDF, and stream processing, such that research on large‐scale data management can be tested and validated. By educating future researchers and potential adopters, and encouraging knowledge transfer and exchange through specifically targeted training, dissemination, and community building programs. By collaborating with interested parties worldwide through our PlanetData Programs.

For whom

For organizations interested in publishing their data in a purposeful way. For researchers working on topics related to large‐scale data management and concerned with staying up‐to‐date on the latest, cutting edge interdisciplinary research results in this area. For technology vendors considering extending their products and services with features, which leverage online data sets, and for businesses that need such functionality to make informed decisions. For collaborators anywhere in the world who care about being part of one of the most exciting developments of the World Wide Web in the last decade, the Web of data.

By whom

By a consortium of nine research partners with outstanding track records in shaping the future of the databases, large‐scale stream processing, data mining, knowledge representation, Web reasoning, and Linked Open Data communities. Collaborating through an open partnership scheme with organizations worldwide through the PlanetData Programs.