The European landscape of TDM research, development and applications was depicted from different point of views, taking into account economic sectors, scientific areas and domains of activity and by exploring data relevant to the available technology and (research) infrastructure(s), the R&D investment (mostly in terms of funded projects), the research output (in terms of scientific publications produced), the resources and tools available for TDM as well as the commercial activity (in terms of companies and organizations investing, using and offering TDM services). Moreover, structured collections of knowledge and information resources on TDM were gathered and structured: these collections encompass single persons or group of people focusing on TDM (i.e. the expert, organization and project collections) and with technologies and resources useful for current and future TDM practitioners (i.e. methods and tools lists). These collections represent the foundations of the information that are available on the FutureTDM platform.
Several sets of guidelines were produced to serve as practical guidelines for stakeholders in the TDM value chain. These include guidelines to help practitioners better understand the legal and licensing situation around TDM, and guidelines to help creators of data and content manage and share their data. Moreover, fundamental policy priorities and practitioner guidelines helped us to develop a future roadmap for increasing uptake of TDM. This roadmap brought together the outcomes of all the research activities of the FutureTDM project to present an EU-level path to stimulating TDM opportunities in Europe.
The development of the FutureTDM platform (www.futuretdm.eu) consisting of an Open Information Hub and a Collaborative Knowledge Base has been supporting the outcomes of the whole project research and dissemination activities. The platform contains a very dynamic blog section to discuss and inform about TDM related issues, consisting of authors within the project and expert in the broader TDM landscape. An event section displayed the events that were organised by the FutureTDM and community events that FutureTDM actively joined. Furthermore, structured collections of knowledge and information resources on TDM were fed into the Knowledge Base section of the platform including intuitive tools like Expert Navigator, TDM Tools, TDM Projects and TDM Methods. These modules made all the valuable collections of FutureTDM, that were gathered throughout the project lifetime, publicly accessible and easily discoverable via its novel design approach.
Moreover, a particular relevance was given to the organization of knowledge cafés and workshops, where different categories of stakeholders were invited to promote the project to their own networks. Finally, a European FutureTDM Symposium as a main networking event inviting stakeholders active in TDM fields and interest groups took place in June 2017 and it was a part of a two-day event, held alongside the International Data Science Conference in Salzburg, Austria.
