SoBigData: Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem

Abstract

One of the most pressing and fascinating challenges scientists face today, is understanding the complexity of our globally interconnected society. The big data arising from the digital breadcrumbs of human activities has the potential of providing a powerful social microscope, which can help us understand many complex and hidden socio-economic phenomena. Such challenge requires high-level analytics, modeling and reasoning across all the social dimensions above. There is a need to harness these opportunities for scientific advancement and for the social good, compared to the currently prevalent exploitation of big data for commercial purposes or, worse, social control and surveillance. The main obstacle to this accomplishment, besides the scarcity of data scientists, is the lack of a large-scale open ecosystem where big data and social mining research can be carried out. The SoBigData Research Infrastructure (RI) provides an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life as recorded by "big data". The research community uses the SoBigData facilities as a "secure digital wind-tunnel" for large-scale social data analysis and simulation experiments. SoBigData promotes repeatable and open science and supports data science research projects by providing: (i) an ever-growing, distributed data ecosystem for procurement, access and curation and management of big social data, to underpin social data mining research within an ethic-sensitive context; (ii) an ever-growing, distributed platform of interoperable, social data mining methods and associated skills: tools, methodologies and services for mining, analysing, and visualising complex and massive datasets, harnessing the techno-legal barriers to the ethically safe deployment of big data for social mining; (iii) an ecosystem where protection of personal information and the respect for fundamental human rights can coexist with a safe use of the same information for scientific purposes of broad and central societal interest. SoBigData has a dedicated ethical and legal board, which is implementing a legal and ethical framework.