The Big Data Public Private Forum (BIG) is a two years project co-funded by the European Commission within FP7 starting in September 2012. BIG aims to provide a platform for industry, research, policy makers and community initiatives to discuss the challenges of Big Data and the emerging Data Economy and to develop suitable action plans for addressing these challenges.
Our society and economy is at the verge of an era where dealing with large amounts of structured data plays an increasingly important role. Such data can be obtained from climate, pollution or traffic sensors in a city, it can comprise customer demand of an online travel agency or crowd-sourced spatial data such as collected by the OpenStreetMaps community. Integrating, analysing and using such data can result in completely new insights, applications as well as products and services. For example, we will be able to re-route traffic, if we detect traffic patterns causing increased air pollution under certain weather conditions. Travel companies can suggest background information on events, historic sights or attractions for certain travel destinations. Governments and public administrations can come closer to citizens and leverage their creative potential by opening up government data.
The Big Data Public Private Forum (BIG) is a two years project co-funded by the European Commission within FP7 starting in September 2012. BIG aims to provide a platform for industry, research, policy makers and community initiatives to discuss the challenges of Big Data and the emerging Data Economy and to develop suitable action plans for addressing these challenges. The BIG consortium has a holistic view on big data comprising also large amounts of small, heterogeneous data.
Work in BIG is organized in sectoral forums and technical working groups. These include:
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Sectoral forums: Health; Public Sector; Finance & Insurance; Telecommunication; Media & Entertainment; Manufacturing; Retail; Energy, Transport
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Technical working groups: Data acquisition, Data analysis, Data curation, Data storage, Data usage
Work in the sectoral forums and technical working groups is performed online (through mailinglists, webinars, telephone conferences) and at workshops, conventions and conferences. The main event co-organized by BIG is the European Data Forum series (online at http://data-forum.eu), with its next installation taking place 19-20 April 2013 in Dublin, Ireland.
The BIG project comprises 11 companies, research institutions and community initiatives from 6 European countries including ATOS, Press Association, Siemens, AGT Group, Uni Innsbruck, National University of Ireland in Galway, University of Leipzig, DFKI, Exalead, Open Knowledge Foundation and STI International. However, the project aims to liaise and involve stakeholders, enterprises and community initiatives in its sectoral forums and working groups.
Partner quotes
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Sören Auer (University of Leipzig): “The ubiquitous availability of the internet as a medium for data collection, aggregation and distribution enables completely novel data-driven applications and usage scenarios.”
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Jarred McGinnis (Press Association): “It is a key milestone when traditional, non-technological industries such as the press start to recognise the opportunities and challenges of ‘Big Data’.”
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Michael Hausenblas (DERI, NUI Galway): “Benefiting from Big Data means understanding the patterns that are deeply buried within it. With the BIG project, we now have a trailblazing activity to seed and eventually grow the understanding of the opportunities and challenges concerning Big Data in Europe and beyond.”
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Ricard Munné (Atos): “It is an opportunity for the public sector to discover how to exploit the full potential of the information accumulated to improve public services and it’s internal efficiency and effectiveness”.
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Pablo Mendes (OKF): “The impact of Open Data grows as an ever increasing amount, depth and diversity of information is made available on the Web, but its highest value can only be attained with adequate methods to store, analyze and effectively interpret those data.”
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Amar Djalil Mezaour (EXALEAD): “Big Data has been of concern to organizations working in specific fields for some time now. These include physical sciences (meteorology, physics), life sciences (genomics, biomedical research), government (defense, treasury), finance and banking (transaction processing, trade analytics), communications (call records, network traffic data), and, of course, the Internet (search engine indexation, social networks). Now, however, due to our digital fecundity, Big Data is a shared concern for organizations of all sizes and types.”
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Diana Pottecher (ATOS) This project will allow us helping other companies in taking advantage of unmanageable information in their business.
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Felicia Lobillo (Atos): “BIG will bring this huge potential closer to reality, benefiting Telcos and their customers
More information on BIG can found at: http://big-project.eu/
