Big data is becoming a hype that is going to completely redefine industries within very traditional sectors like agriculture, food and beauty. The emergence of niche big data companies like Enolytics (“bringing big data insights to the wine industry”) is threatening to disrupt these industries against the interests of the EU. BigDataGrapes wants to build upon the rich historical, cultural and artisan heritage of Europe in order to change this picture. It aims to support all European companies active in two key industries powered by grapevines: the wine industry and the natural cosmetics one. It will help them respond to the significant opportunity that big data is creating in their relevant markets, by pursuing two ambitious goals: a. To develop and demonstrate powerful, rigorously tested, cross-sector data processing technologies that go beyond-the-state-of-the-art towards increasing the efficiency of companies that need to take important business decisions dependent on access to vast and complex amounts of data, and assess them in challenges informed by the grapevine-powered industries. b. To create a large-scale, mulifaceted marketplace for grapevine-related data assets, increasing the competitive advantage of companies that serve with IT solutions these sectors and helping companies and organisations evolve methods, standards and processes to help them achieve free, interoperable and secure flow of their data. BigDataGrapes is targeting technology challenges of the grapevine-powered data economy as its business problems and decisions requires processing, analysis and visualisation of data with rapidly increasing volume, velocity and variety: satellite and weather data, environmental and geological data, phenotypic and genetic plant data, food supply chain data, economic and financial data and more. It therefore makes a perfectly suitable cross-sector and cross-country combination of industries that are of high European significance and value.

The overall objective of the KConnect project is to create a medical text Data-Value Chain with a critical mass of participating companies using cutting-edge commercial cloud-based services for multilingual Semantic Annotation, Semantic Search and Machine Translation of Electronic Health Records and medical publications. The commercial cloud-based services will be the result of productisation of the multilingual medical text processing tools developed in the Khresmoi FP7 project, allowing wide adoption of these tools by industry. The critical mass will be created by the KConnect Professional Services Community, which will consist of at least 30 companies by the end of the project. These companies will be trained to build solutions based on the KConnect Services, hence serving as multipliers for commercial exploitation of the KConnect services. The KConnect project will facilitate the straightforward adaptation of the commercialised services to new languages by providing toolkits enabling the adaptation to be done by by people having a software engineering skillset, as opposed to the rarer language engineering skillset. The KConnect services will also be adapted to handle text in Electronic Health Records, which is particularly challenging due to misspellings, neologisms, organisation-specific acronyms, and heavy use of negation and hedging. The consortium is driven by a core group of four innovative SMEs following complementary business perspectives related to medical text analysis and search. These companies will build solutions for their customers based on KConnect technology. Two partners from the medical domain will use KConnect services to solve their medical record analysis challenges. Two highly-used medical search portal providers will implement the KConnect services to innovate the services offered by their search portals. Through these search portals, the KConnect technologies will be used by over 1 million European citizens before the end of the project