The European Data Forum will bring toghether representatives of industry, academia, policy makers, grassroot and community initiatives, and potential data providers and technology adopters interested in addressing major challenges of Big Data and the emerging Data Economy.

The amount of data that is available in digital form is growing exponentially. Governments, companies and even individuals generate large amounts of data during everyday interactions. Accordingly, the problem of managing and analyzing this wealth of information has become a pressing problem at various levels. In many industry sectors handling data is now an essential factor of production. However, the management of Big Data is associated with a number of challenges, including: the immense data volume; the high velocity of real-time data streams; the heterogeneous form of the data produced, and consumed, by a wide variety of organizations and individuals; and privacy concerns when handling large amounts of personal data. While many technologies exist for managing and analyzing data, they are often not suited for the scale of and complexity of most application scenarios, which require highly parallelized, distributed, advanced technical infrastructure for storage and processing.

Big Data management and analytics will play an important role in development of the European economy. It will allow industry to create new products, innovate new business models and increase the competitiveness of European companies based on the value created through new technology solutions and markets. Through the European Data Forum we provide an enviroment for all interested stakeholders to meet, look ahead and prepare strategies to deal with the challenges posed by Big Data.

The Forum will consist of a mixture of presentations and networking sessions by industry, academics, policy makers and community initiatives, complemented by a other parts of the program, e.g. SME call kick-off, and hackathon. We are seeking inspiring presentations addressing fundamental technical, application, socio-economic and policy-related topics related to Big Data management and analytics. The presentations will vary in format and focus depending on the main expected audience and their contributors. They will be reviewed by the Organization Committee of the Forum.