A roadmap for big data incorporating both the research roadmap and the policy roadmap: BYTE Policy and Research Roadmap

Stéphane Grumbach, Aurélien Faravelon, Martí Cuquet, Anna Fenseli, Scott Cunningham, Rachel Finn.
D6.1 BYTE Project, 22 August 2017.
[ PDF | Bibtex ]

This document presents the BYTE big data roadmap to capture the economic, social and ethical, legal and political benefits associated with the use of big data in Europe. It provides the necessary policy and research actions necessary to achieve the BYTE vision and guidelines to assist industry and scientists to address externalities in order to improve innovation and competitiveness and also incorporate the needs of civil society, NGOs and other non-profit organisations.

The BYTE project is a multi-disciplinary study of the societal impacts of big data in seven European sectors aimed to define a roadmap and create a community that address and optimise these impacts. The goal of the roadmap is to guide European policy and research efforts to develop a socially responsible big data economy, and to allow stakeholders and the big data community built around the BYTE project to identify and meet big data challenges and proceed with a shared understanding of the societal impact, positive and negative externalities and concrete problems worth investigating in future programmes.

The roadmap is the culmination of a series of case studies, analysis, expert focus groups and workshops conducted within the BYTE project. Positive and negative big data externalities in economic, social and ethical, legal and political areas have been observed and analysed in the seven initial sectors considered in the case studies (crisis informatics, culture, energy, environment, healthcare, maritime transportation and smart city), and further extended to a total of 18 sectors via a literature review, to provide a set of risks, opportunities and recommendations of best practices. The roadmap results have been validated through two separate workshops focused on the research and the policy parts.

The policy roadmap is structured around three priorities: data governance, social good and big data infrastructure. For each priority, a set of short-term actions to perform and a set of actions to accomplish by 2030 are provided.

The research roadmap covers six areas —data management, data processing, data analysis, data protection, data visualisation and non-technical priorities— and a detailed timeframe of 5 years, which is also extended to include a mid- (up to 2025) and a long-term (up to 2030) period, to address research topics in each of these areas in order to deliver social impact, skills development and standardisation. Finally, it also identifies what sectors will be most benefited by each of the research efforts.

The present roadmap also foresees an annual deeper study of selected sectors to be taken up initially by the BYTE project partners and community members, and by the BYTE community alone after project completion. In this document, an initial analysis of the specific policy and research needs is provided for the environment, healthcare and smart city sectors selected for the first year.

@techreport{Grumbach2017_roadmap,
  author = {Grumbach, Stéphane and Faravelon, Aurélien and Cuquet, Martí and Fensel, Anna and Cunningham, Scott and Finn, Rachel},
  title = {A roadmap for big data incorporating both the research roadmap and the policy roadmap: BYTE Policy and Research Roadmap},
  institution = {BYTE Project},
  month = aug,
  year = 2017,
  number = {D6.1},
  type = {Project deliverable},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1195745},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1195745},
}