PlanetData aims to establish a sustainable European community of researchers that supports organizations in exposing their data in new and useful ways. The ability to effectively and efficiently make sense out of the enormous amounts of data continuously published online, including data streams, (micro)blog posts, digital archives, eScience resources, public sector data sets, and the Linked Open Data Cloud, is a crucial ingredient for Europe's transition to a knowledge society. It allows businesses, governments, communities and individuals to take decisions in an informed manner, ensuring competitive advantages, and general welfare.

The PlanetData project is based upon three objectives that together create a durable community made up of academic and industrial partners. This community is supported in conducting research in the large-scale data management area through the provision of data sets and access to tailored data management technology. This community also benefits from a comprehensive program of training, dissemination, standardization, and networking activities, intended to strengthen existing collaborations and establish new ones, to educate organizations in key questions related to open data exposure, and to transfer research results towards industry. PlanetData’s objectives are:

1. Research: To bring together approaches to large-scale data management from different disciplines in order to create holistic solutions to the challenges faced when dealing with planetary-scale data.
2. Data provisioning and management: To provide software to support large-scale data provisioning, made available via the PlanetData Lab, supporting relational, graph, and stream processing, for researchers to test and validate their techniques. To create definitive vocabularies for the description of data sets and their context. To build a catalogue of data sets in vertical domains chosen for their high adoption potential and data management needs. To publicize guidelines and best practices for provisioning, such that available data sets can be more readily consumed by end-users and efficiently assembled into innovative products and services.
3. Impact: To provide a medium through which the research results and empirical findings of the PlanetData network can be used to improve the education level related to large-scale data management in both academia and industry; to bring together researchers from disparate disciplines in order to form an integrated community that can support organizations in publishing their data in a way that is purposeful, thus addressing key challenges of large-scale data management; to encourage (industrial) uptake through standardization, and strategic dissemination and networking events.

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