The Big Data Test Infrastructure has launched the following course: "Enabling a Data-informed Public Sector: An Introductory Course to BDTI Essentials." The course is primarily designed for professionals and students in the public sector, academics, and citizens, though its insights into data analytics and utilisation of open-source tools are valuable for a wide range of audiences.

This free course taught in English is centred around a highly practical use case: Analysing green project funding and initiatives in highly polluted EU regions, using open data from data.europa.eu and other open sources. It comprehensively introduces Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI), covering essential topics like data access, cleaning, analytics, and visualisation. 

Participating in this course will prepare individuals to build their own data use cases. After this course, they will be ready to apply for BDTI and build a public sector data use case using the platform. It is an excellent opportunity for those interested in data-driven decision-making and public-sector innovation. 

In terms of the level of knowledge required for this course, this series of courses is accessible to all levels as it starts with foundational courses.

We encourage all interested professionals, students, and public servants to register for this free course. For more information and registration details, visit their course page.

This series of e-learning courses will be organised into five courses covering the list of topics below. Each session will last 1 hour 15 minutes and begin at 11:00 am CEST. Below you can find the agenda for the five sessions:

Session 1: Data Access and Exploration   02/02/24 | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM CES

In this first session, we'll present the use case, introducing BDTI and one of our data analysis tools.

You'll learn to download, load and access data in different formats.

You'll begin your first exploration of the data and decide what data are useful to complete this task during the following sessions. 

Session 2: Data Cleaning and Transformation   16/02/24 | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM CEST

This week, you'll clean your data by addressing data quality issues like missing values.

You'll learn specific techniques for data cleaning and transformation.​ And you'll prepare the datasets for further analysis.

Session 3: Data Blending and Storage   01/03/24 | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM CEST

This week, you’ll identify when multiple data files have the same structure (columns) and can be concatenated.

Session 4: Analytics   15/03/24. | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM CEST

This week, you’ll be learning how to get insights from the data and build a report.

Session 5: Advanced Module: Gathering Data from the Web and Geo Visualisation​   22/03/24 | 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM CEST

You'll learn how to tell your data's story using more advanced data visualisation techniques using data visualisation tools from BDT