Partnered by experts from another 6 European countries, researchers from the Information Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, with leader Prof. Grigoris Antoniou, have joined a network of excellence that aims to set up a mechanism to help organizations safely publish their data over the Internet.

The objective of PlanetData is to establish a durable European community of researchers that provides organizations with support for safely publishing their data, while at the same time empowering them to make sense of the huge quantities of data continuously published online. Such data may be structured or unstructured, and may have the form of streams of data, microblog entries, digital files, e-science resources, public sector datasets or linked data in the cloud.

The project focuses on a series of key challenges that have to be tackled to support the efficient, scalable and secure exposure of data in a serviceable form on a large scale. It offers data stream representations and scalable techniques for integrating, publishing and accessing such data resources on the Web. Additionally, PlanetData addresses the problem of assessing and improving the quality of data and defines the best practices for capturing the context in which data are produced and make sense - including provenance, space and time - as a means of increasing the effectiveness of data processing and retrieval techniques.

Data Quality, Provenance and Access Policies

PlanetData will provide techniques for assessing, recording, preserving and, whenever possible, improving data quality by means of repair techniques during information processing.

In this respect, part of the research that will be conducted by the Information Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science-FORTH includes the development of repair techniques to resolve violations of constraints on the data. In addition, FORTH researchers will focus mostly on provenance, access control, privacy and digital rights management. In the context of Linked Data, an important issue is to record the provenance (i.e., origin) of data that can be used to support applications such as trustworthiness and quality assessment, among others. Furthermore, ISL researchers will work on effective access control and privacy mechanisms for large scale linked data which will not be a barrier to the unproblematic use of the data.

7th Framework Programme

Defined as "a European Network of Excellence on Large-Scale Data Management", PlanetData is receiving 3 million euros in funding from the European Commission as part of the 7th Framework Programme. It kicked off in October 2010 and is due to end in September 2014.

The project is led by Innsbruck's Semantic Technology Institute (STI), attached to the Austrian University of Innsbruck. Other consortium members are the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), in Amsterdam, Holland; the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSIR) at the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences in Lausanne, Switzerland; the Information Systems Laboratory of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Heraklion, Greece; the Freie Universitat of Berlin's Web-based Systems Group, in Berlin, Germany; Jozef Stefan Institute's Department of Knowledge Technologies (JSI) in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) of Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in Karlsruhe, Germany; the Ontological Engineering Group (OEG) based at the UPM Facultad de Informatica in Madrid, Spain, and the Vienna-based STI International, in Austria.

Professor Grigoris Antoniou
Head of Information Systems Laboratory
Ιnstitute of Computers Science, FORTH
Tel. +30 2810391624
Fax +30 2810391638
Email: antoniou@ics.forth.gr