Big data is becoming a hype that is going to redefine complete industries within very traditional sectors like agriculture, food and beauty. For instance, the wine industry is booming with business articles on the potential that big data has (e.g. “How Big Data Can Predict the Wine Of The Century”, “The Perfect Pairing: Machine Learning and Wine”, “Here's What Happens When Wine And Geeks Mix”).

BigDataGrapes wants to build upon the rich historical, cultural and artisan heritage of Europe, aiming 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:

• To develop and demonstrate powerful data processing technologies that will increase the efficiency of companies that need to take important business decisions dependent on access to vast and complex amounts of data.

• To catalyse the creation of a data ecosystem and economy that will increase the competitive advantage of companies that serve with IT solutions these sectors.

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.