Data science at SoBigData: the European research infrastructure for social mining and big data analytics

Most people have become “big data” producers in their daily life. Our desires, opinions, sentiments, social links as well as our mobile phone calls and GPS track leave traces of our behaviours. To transform these data into knowledge, value is a complex task of data science. This paper shows how the SoBigData Research Infrastructure supports data science towards the new frontiers of big data exploitation. Our research infrastructure serves a large community of social sensing and social mining researchers and it reduces the gap between existing research centres present at European level. SoBigData integrates resources and creates an infrastructure where sharing data and methods among text miners, visual analytics researchers, socio-economic scientists, network scientists, political scientists, humanities researchers can indeed occur. The main concepts related to SoBigData Research Infrastructure are presented. These concepts support virtual and transnational (on-site) access to the resources. Creating and supporting research communities are considered to be of vital importance for the success of our research infrastructure, as well as contributing to train the new generation of data scientists. Furthermore, this paper introduces the concept of exploratory and shows their role in the promotion of the use of our research infrastructure. The exploratories presented in this paper represent also a set of real applications in the context of social mining. Finally, a special attention is given to the legal and ethical aspects. Everything in SoBigData is supervised by an ethical and legal framework.