BIG Work in Progress: Big Data Public Private Forum and Public Sector
Ricard Munné Atos Spain S. A., Barcelona, Spain ricard. munne @ atosresearch. eu
Abstract: Big Data is considered a strategic topic by the European Commission, which can contribute to increase European competitiveness, providing tools with high added value in the context of Future Internet applications and services, and within the framework of the Europe 2020 strategy, launched by the EC to exit the crisis and prepare the EU economy for the next challenges. Building an industrial community around Big Data in Europe is the priority of this project, together with setting up the required collaboration and dissemination infrastructure to link technology suppliers, integrators and leading user organizations. BIG is working towards the definition and implementation of a clear strategy that tackles the necessary efforts in terms of research and innovation, providing a major boost for technology adoption and supporting actions from the European Commission in the successful implementation of the Big Data economy. As part of this strategy, the outcomes of this project will be used as inputs for Horizon 2020 and sustained beyond the project duration. The use of Big Data technologies applied to different markets is already showing a great impact by improving processes performance, and therefore, impacting the global productivity. BIG has selected a wide spectrum of domains based on several business and opportunity criteria. One of these domains is the Public Sector, as one of those with more potential benefits from the use of Big Data technologies. At this point, a first draft of Sector’ s requisites has been produced with the requirements for the potential use of Big Data technologies. The final version of these requisites will be integrated in the roadmap that will be produced in a later stage.
Keywords: coordination action, big data, public sector, data management and usage, roadmap, public private forum
1. Introduction
Big Data Public Private Forum( BIG) is a Coordination action co‐funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme( FP7 / 2007‐2013). The consortium is composed by 11 partners from industry, research institutes and non‐profit organizations. BIG is a two‐year long project that started in September 2012.
The European Commission launched in March 2010 the Europe 2020 Strategy to exit the crisis and prepare the EU economy for the next challenges in terms of productivity, economy and social cohesion, to name a few. Intelligent Information Management in general and Big Data in particular is considered to be a strategic topic that can contribute to increase European competitiveness, providing tools that will be translated into high added value in the context of Future Internet applications and services. Moreover, materializing opportunities in these domains requires a holistic approach, where technical activities work jointly with business, regulatory and policy aspects.
The volume of data being digitally stored and exchanged is growing exponentially. We are on the verge of an era where every device is online, ubiquitous sensors generate continuous streams of data, very high bandwidth data conduits expand to transport high definition media, and information complexity allows the development of Internet services such as search engines, social media sites, and many other similar dataconsuming sites.
Here, innovative technology offers alternatives to solve the inherent problems that appear when working with huge amounts of data, providing new ways to reuse and extract value from information. Three main dimensions characterize Big Data: huge variety of data formats, often time‐sensitive and large.
Data have become a new factor of production, such as hard assets and human capital. As such, having the right technological basis and organizational structure to exploit data is essential. While US‐based companies like Yahoo or Google are widely recognized for their works in Big Data, very few research organizations, including SMEs, are known for their work in that field in Europe, still without enough industrial support to become competitive in front of giants like the aforementioned ones.
While limitations of current technologies can be presented as problems, Europe has a huge opportunity derived from Intelligent Information Management in general and Big Data in particular. Big Data offers
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