How can the Big Data Test Infrastructure help the European Public Administration overcome socio-economic problems through a data-informed public sector?

The public sector faces increasingly complex socio-economic problems that require innovative solutions. Big data and data-informed decision-making offer a pathway to better solutions, greater transparency, and enhanced trust in public administration.

The European Commission launched the Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) under the Digital Europe Programme to tackle these challenges. The BDTI aims to promote the reuse of public sector data and facilitate a data-informed public sector across EU Member States. It provides public administrations with a comprehensive set of mainstream open-source tools for data storage, processing, and analytics, all hosted in the cloud and free of charge.

The BDTI offers a variety of open-source tools to facilitate data-driven projects, including data storage and processing tools for handling large datasets, analytics tools for analysis and visualisation, and cloud infrastructure for running data-intensive tasks. Its open-source nature ensures flexibility, allowing public administrations to explore different solutions cost-effectively.

Several public administrations have utilized and continue to use the BDTI to enhance decision-making processes, for instance, the University of Macedonia in Greece together with GRNET transformed data gathered through the MITOS API (Greek National Registry of Administrative Public Service) into linked data aligned with the EU standard model to support more public services, you can read more here.  More successful stories can be found on our website in the following section.

Public administrations interested in using the BDTI can subscribe to the Joinup page or to “The BDTI Kitchen: Baking Data Stories” newsletter for updates on future events and initiatives.

Are you a civil servant interested in developing your own use case on the BDTI or a student and researcher eager to support a public administration? Apply for a BDTI pilot project here, or reach out to the team via EC-BDTI-PILOTS@ec.europa.eu