The SPECIAL project will address the contradiction between Big Data innovation and privacy-aware data protection by proposing a technical solution that makes both of these goals realistic. We will develop technology that: (i) supports the acquisition of user consent at collection time and the recording of both data and metadata (consent, policies, event data, context) according to legislative and user-specified policies; (ii) caters for privacy-aware, secure workflows that include usage/access control, transparency and compliance verification; (iii) demonstrates robustness in terms of performance, scalability and security all of which are necessary to support privacy preserving innovation in Big Data environments; and (iv) provides a dashboard with feedback and control features that make privacy in Big Data comprehensible and manageable for data subjects, controllers, and processors. SPECIAL shall allow citizens and organisations to share more data, while guaranteeing data protection compliance, thus enabling both trust and the creation of valuable new insights from shared data. Our vision will be realised and validated via real world use cases that - in order to be viable - need to overcome current challenges concerning the processing and sharing of data in a privacy preserving manner. In order to realise this vision, we will combine and significantly extend big data architectures to handle Linked Data, harness them with sticky policies as well as scalable queryable encryption, and develop advanced user interaction and control features: SPECIAL will build on top of the Big Data Europe and PrimeLife Projects, exploit their results, and further advance the state of the art of privacy enhancing technologies.

BigDataEurope will provide support mechanisms for all the major aspects of a data value chain, in terms of the employed data and technology assets, the participating roles and the established or evolving processes. The effectiveness of the provided support mechanisms will be assessed in different domains pertaining to Europe’s major societal challenges with respect to the needs and requirements of the related communities. To this end, BigDataEurope focuses on providing an integrated stack of tools to manipulate, publish and use large-scale data resources; tools that can be installed and used freely in a customised data processing chain with minimal knowledge of the technologies involved and integrating and industrially hardening key open-source Big Data technologies and European research prototypes into a Big Data Integrator Platform, i.e. an ecosystem of specifications and reference implementations that are both attractive to current players from all parts of the data value chain while also lowering the entry barrier for new businesses. In order to realise its objectives, Big Data Europe will focus on two clearly defined coordination and support measures: 1. Coordination: Engaging with a diverse range of stakeholder groups representing particularly the Horizon 2020 societal challenges Health, Food & Agriculture, Energy, Transport, Climate, Social Sciences and Security; Collecting requirements for the ICT infrastructure needed by data-intensive science practitioners tackling a wide range of societal challenges; covering all aspects of publishing and consuming semantically interoperable, large-scale data and knowledge assets; 2. Support: Designing, realizing and evaluating a Big Data Aggregator platform infrastructure that meets requirements, minimises the disruption to current workflows, and maximises the opportunities to take advantage of the latest European RTD developments, including multilingual data harvesting, data analytics, and data visualisation. BigDataEurope will implement and apply two main instruments to successfully realize these coordination and support measures: a) Build Societal Big Data Interest Groups in the W3C interest group scheme and involving a large number of stakeholders from the Horizon 2020 societal challenges as well as technical Big Data experts; b) Design, integrate and deploy a cloud-deployment-ready Big Data aggregator platform comprising key open-source Big Data technologies for real-time and batch processing, such as Hadoop, Cassandra and Storm. BigDataEurope aims to provide an adaptable, easy to deploy and use solution, which will allow the interest-ed user groups and stakeholders to extend their Big Data solutions or introduce Big Data technology to their business processes, based on a concrete methodology for producing a technically sound solution and maximizing its outreach to the relevant communities.

The revolution in information technology over the last years has proven its ability to process huge amounts of data and made evident that big data can change the world. Open Government Data (OGD), from being an obscure possibility just five years ago, is spreading across the globe at a phenomenal rate, delivering the promise to spur innovation, to deliver better services for less money, to improve planning, to increase transparency, and to reduce corruption. In this context, YourDataStories envisions to bring this promise closer to reality, through a highly customisable online platform for data exploitation focused in the financial flows that are critical for transparency, collaboration and participation. Users, ranging from governmental bodies to journalists and to citizens, will be facilitated by powerful and established tools, not only to discover relevant information but also to remix it with diverse and dynamic data sources: YourDataStories acts like an interactive canvas to enable data citizens to (re)write their own data history. YourDataStories brings an innovative solution whose innovation potential spreads across many directions, from leveraging best practices and proven technologies across Europe, to exploiting the social Web for accessing citizens, and to supporting sustainable public services across borders. Building on top of the "Transparency Portal" initiative of the Greek government, YourDataStories can be viewed as a way to showcase and transfer the existing expertise to European level, in an attempt to transform governments and governance in Europe. At the same time, YourDataStories seeks to exploit and embed in this effort the benefits of the social Web, establishing an innovative bidirectional channel between the Social and Semantic Web. Finally, YourDataStories aims to support sustainable services, supported by a marketing ecosystem of applications offering cross-border services of public finance flows across Europe.

The TRAPEZE project aims to drive a cultural shift in the protection of the European data economy by weaving trust into its very foundation and reconstructing the concepts of control, transparency, and compliance through technical and methodological, citizen-first, innovations. Driven by the needs of three distinct real-world use cases, TRAPEZE brings together over a decade worth of EU-funded research in security and privacy, as well as proprietary solutions and know-how, towards realistic and marketable solutions. We will develop technologies which: (i) empower citizens with the necessary tools and know-how to manage their security and privacy and actively contribute to the cyber resilience of the common European data space; (ii) enforce the integrity and nonrepudiation of citizens’ data usage policies and processing across data sources and controllers’ borders; (iii) dynamically acquire citizens’ consent and adjust their data policies in real time in response to their changing circumstances; (iv) protect citizens’ online communications and applications running on their personal devices against malicious agents; and (v) provide citizens, as well as other relevant stakeholders (including controllers, CERTs/CSIRTs, and data protection authorities) with a comprehensible overview of transborder data lineage and flows, as well as proof of legal compliance, even in big data environments. By relying on Linked Data and Blockchain, TRAPEZE will lead the way in putting the often-misplaced cutting-edge technologies to practical use and become a lighthouse for European and global initiatives aiming to deliver privacy-aware innovations. Finally, to ensure citizens of all groups can have an active role in the protection of their data flows, TRAPEZE will place a special emphasis on usability and co-production, involving European citizens directly in the development of its security- and privacy-enhancing technologies.