The Principal Projects Underpinning This Work

This chapter describes the set of projects that we have concentrated upon to help map out the landscape and to draw out the potential benefits that can arise through combining a citizen's personal data with existing available data. It also draws attention as to why the European Commission decided to fund these projects, a major one being to support the emergence of data markets and the data economy, and, specifically, to set up and operate platforms for secure and controlled sharing of "closed data" (proprietary and/or personal data). These projects were also funded to address the necessary technical, organisational, legal, and commercial aspects of data sharing/brokerage/ trading, whilst building on existing computing platforms.