A recently launched  European Network of Excellence will support governments and other organizations to link large amounts of data on the web. This gives users access to more information and a better understanding of the data. The network is called PlanetData and consists of nine research institutes from different European countries*, including the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. One of the main goals of the project is to create a durable community. Organizations that have large amounts of useful data available and want to link those data on the web can join the community. In the research project CWI focuses on the design of a large-scale streaming data management system.

Smart applications: E-government
Click on a map and monitor where the public money in your neighborhood is used for. Follow the MP you have voted for and find out which meetings and missions he attends and what views he proclaims. These are examples of a transparent and accountable government that publishes data directly. In addition to more transparency, governments also get more efficient: they can easily access each other's data and citizens that have inquiries need fewer contact with officials. Not only governments, but also innovative business services are within reach when files become public and interchangeable. Think of using a combination of business data with traffic and GPS techniques. The European Commission estimates that reuse of public sector information will yield additional economic activity worth 27 billion euros **.

Technical difficulties
There are still many technical difficulties to overcome before petabytes of structured and unstructured data distributed in storage centers, sensor networks, scientific databases or Twitter, can be made accessible in an efficient way. An important feature of these data is that they constantly enter. And for some of these flows, the frequency can vary. For the project, the research group Database Architectures from CWI will develop a streaming database system. In this new system, the user can not only search in existing data, but also in streaming data.

Privacy issues
Except for the resolution of technical problems, the researchers also focus on privacy issues: how can confidential information be ensured from leaking, without unduly protecting public information? In PlanetData scientists want to contribute to publish in a responsible way more and more large data on the web and make those data accessible and usable.

PlanetData
In PlanetData European experts have joined their forces. They will build bridges between different scientific disciplines such as logic, computer science and philosophy of language. They will also enter into partnerships with governments and companies. The research project is funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission. The research group Database Architectures from CWI continually works at the progress of database architectures and database management systems. Under the supervision of Kersten the open source database management system MonetDB has been developed and is nowadays worldwide used.


*Semantic Technology Institute (STI) ,Oostenrijk ; Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Nederland;  École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Zwitserland; Foundation for Research and Technology ¬Hellas (FORTH) , Griekenland; Freie Universität Berlin (FUB),  Duitsland ; Jozef Stefan Institute (IJS), Slovenia;  Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Duitsland; Universidad Politecnica Madrid (UPM), Spanje.

** Study on Measuring European Public Sector Information Resources (MEPSIR), June 2006

More information on PlanetData: http://www.planet-data.eu/