RISCAPE will provide systematic, focused, high quality, comprehensive, consistent and peer-reviewed international landscape analysis report on the position and complementarities of the major European research infrastructures in the international research infrastructure landscape. To achieve this, RISCAPE will establish a close links with a stakeholder panel representing the main user groups of the report, including representatives from ESFRI, the OECD and Member state funding agencies to ensure usability and the focus of the Report. It will also benefit from close co-operation with other projects and initiatives in the European research infrastructures development to ensure consistency with the existing landscape work. Particularly, RISCAPE builds on the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the ESFRI landscape report (2016) and on the landscape analysis done or currently underway in the H2020 cluster projects. RISCAPE leverages the experts on the European RIs with extensive knowledge on the disciplines involved and RI development in Europe and the project benefits from the contacts and tools developed in the cluster- and international RI collaboration projects to maximize the discipline-specific usability of the results. A key factor in the RISCAPE analysis is that the complementarities will be analyzed in a way which is natural and suitable for the discipline and RI in question. The resulting Report and the used methods will be independently peer reviewed to maximize the usability and objectivity of the information provided for the EU strategic RI development and policy. The project answers directly to the European Commission strategy on EU international cooperation in research and innovation, particularly on the need to obtain objective information in order to help implement the (EC) strategic approach.

Europe is facing huge socio-economic challenges: an economic crisis with a young generation in search of jobs, population ageing potentially straining inclusion and innovation of our societies, climate change with its pressures to redesign energy, transport and housing patterns, just to name some of the most urgent “Grand Challenges”. SERISS brings together three research infrastructures in the social sciences: the European Social Survey (ESS), the Survey for Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe and the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). Also involved in SERISS are non-ESFRI research infrastructures: GGP - Generations and Gender Programme; EVS - European Values Survey and the WageIndicator Survey. The overarching objective of this project is to support the Union, the Commission and the Member States to tackle these challenges with a solid base of socio-economic evidence. The scientific objective of this project is to exploit the synergies among these three infrastructures to their fullest extent and to leverage these synergies to influence the still rather fragmented landscape of smaller infrastructures. Specific bjectives are • to better represent the European population, including target groups of policy measures addressing the Grand Challenges, e.g., young unemployed, older persons in institutions and migrants, • to strengthen cross-national harmonization across Europe by leveraging recent advances in questionnaire design, translation and coding techniques, • to exploit the advances in software technology for cost-effective web-based interviewing, more efficient fieldwork management, and to support new ways of collecting data • to better connect the world of research-driven social surveys with the world of process-generated administrative data, and, • to ensure that the ethical and data protection concerns of the respondents are properly be taken into account by creating a consistent and EU-wide framework for all social surveys

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.

After CESSDA's successful launch we must now achieve full European coverage, and strength and sustainability for the widened network. European coverage: In each country the barriers to, and the potential value and benefits from, membership will be examined, and existing relevant infrastructure mapped. Bespoke coordination, networking activities, and stakeholder forums, all designed to address the specific barriers, will be delivered. In particular, relationships between national ministries, Research Councils, and the social science research community will be built. Relevant work in other completed initiatives (eg. SERSCIDA, DASISH, DwB) would be taken up and moved to the next stage of practical and direct support for achieving membership of the CESSDA Research Infrastructure. National opportunities for using European structural funds and other sources of support will be explored. The approach is to ensure the national and European economic and social benefits, and the positive returns on investment, that are achieved through membership of CESSDA are wholly apparent to the relevant national decision-makers. Strength and sustainability : The widened membership must form a strong and sustained network, where global best practice is built in to the infrastructure of European social science and research. Membership of CESSDA should mean membership of a world class support infrastructure. Links with practical benefits will be established with equivalent infrastructures in other continents. The benefits of coordinated collaboration and consultation with trans-national European stakeholders (for example, Eurostat, European Parliament, Consilium) will bring benefits to all national CESSDA Members. The visibility of this research infrastructure and its importance to excellent evidence in policy making will be enhanced. Further, existing national infrastructures must complete their transition into a holistic service, capable of access services for all.