The Copernicus App Lab aims at bridging the digital divide between the established, science-driven Earth observation community and the young, innovative, entrepreneurial world of mobile developers by establishing of a proof-of-concept for providing the data from the Copernicus Land, Marine Environment and Atmosphere Monitoring Services as Linked Open Data (LOD) for take-up of EO data in mobile applications. The experiences of the consortium as key technology provider in various international competition events, such as the Copernicus Masters, shows that easy access to data is crucial for the success of EO business development. Main benefits: - Empowering the uptake of Copernicus Services in the mobile developer community by offering a one-stop-shop for mobile developers who wish to integrate Copernicus data into their value-added services via the tools needed and in the format known by mobile developers. - Improving data utilization by publishing value-added products from Copernicus data and services as Linked Open Data finally leading to better and more numerous mobile Copernicus apps. - Trigger business opportunities along the value added chain of EO data and services by providing tools for publishing and interlinking EO data, for querying EO data and for visualizing EO data. - Engaging the user community by setting a strong focus on dissemination activities and by collecting user feedback during a virtual beta testing phase and direct exchange with mobile developers during an ESA Space App Camp.

Changes in rural areas, such as depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity, may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible. Policymakers can steer these developments in order to reduce their negative impacts but this requires knowing whether current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect people, planet, profits and land-use. To be truly useful, this knowledge must transcend siloed thinking and be the corollary of a joint effort uniting different actors under a common cause. PoliRur will provide this knowledge by combining several key activities needed to design effective place-based, human-centric and forward-looking rural policies. These include actionable research that takes place within an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that tries to glean the development trajectory of agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place. As a result of these activities, PoliRur will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.