Motivation

Multiple dimensions of our social life have “big data” proxies: our desires, opinions and sentiments leave their traces in our web pages, social media, query logs; our social links leave their traces in the network of our phone or email contacts and in social networks; our movements leave their traces in the records of our phone calls and GPS tracks. This increasing wealth of data is a chance to disentangle social complexity and face the challenges of our world, provided we can rely on social data mining, i.e., adequate means for accessing big data and extracting useful knowledge from them.

Challenges  & Highlights

SoBigData aims at creating the Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem: a research infrastructure providing an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life. Building on several established national infrastructures, SoBigData will open up new research avenues in multiple research fields, including mathematics, ICT, and human, social and economic sciences, by enabling easy comparison, re-use and integration of state-of-the-art big social data, methods, and services, into new research. It will create a pan-European, inter-disciplinary community of social data scientists, fostered by extensive training, networking, and innovation activities. In addition, as an open research infrastructure, SoBigData will promote repeatable and open science.

Potential applications & future issues

Although SoBigData is primarily aimed at serving the needs of researchers, the openly available datasets and open source methods and services provided by the new research infrastructure will also impact industrial and other stakeholders (e.g. government bodies, non-profit organizations, funders, policy-makers).

This work is supported by the European Community’s H2020 Program under the scheme ‘INFRAIA-1-2014-2015: Research Infrastructures’, grant agreement #654024 ‘SoBigData: Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem’