The Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) provides a ready-to-use, free of charge cloud-based analytics test environment for Public Administrations in the European Member States to experiment with open-source tools and to prototype solutions before deploying them in the production environment on their own premises. Any Public Administration at any level can request to use BDTI to perform analysis and experiments on their public sector information, for a period of six months, completely for free. The test environment provided by the BDTI consists of several open-source solutions, data sources and the required cloud infrastructure that includes the virtual machines, analytics clusters, storage facilities and networking facilities. BDTI offers the opportunity of starting to get insights from PAs public information, understanding how they can move towards data-driven decision making.

BDTI was created by the European Commission in 2019 and is funded by the Digital Europe Programme (DEP).

As part of their resources, they have recently 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.

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, or Living-in.EU events page.