SoBigData RI: european integrated infrastructure for social mining and big data analytics

SoBigData RI has the ambition to support the rising demand for cross-disciplinary research and innovation on the multiple aspects of social complexity from combined data and model-driven perspectives and the increasing importance of ethics and data scientists' responsibility as pillars of trustworthy use of Big Data and analytical technology. Digital traces of human activities offer a considerable opportunity to scrutinize the ground truth of individual and collective behaviour at an unprecedented detail and on a global scale. This increasing wealth of data is a chance to understand social complexity, provided we can rely on social mining, i.e., adequate means for accessing big social data and models for extracting knowledge from them. SoBigData RI, with its tools and services, empowers researchers and innovators through a platform for the design and execution of large-scale social mining experiments, open to users with diverse backgrounds, accessible on the cloud (aligned with EOSC), and also exploiting supercomputing facilities. Pushing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable) and FACT (Fair, Accountable, Confidential, and Transparent) principles will render social mining experiments more efficiently designed, adjusted, and repeatable by domain experts that are not data scientists. SoBigData RI moves forward from the simple awareness of ethical and legal challenges in social mining to the development of concrete tools that operationalize ethics with value-sensitive design, incorporating values and norms for privacy protection, fairness, transparency, and pluralism. SoBigData RI is the result of two H2020 grants (g.a. n.654024 and 871042), and it is part of the ESFRI 2021 Roadmap.