The main aim of PlanetData is to establish an interdisciplinary, sustainable European community of researchers, helping organizations to expose their data on the Web in a useful way. PlanetData will push forward the state-of-the-art in large-scale data management and its application to the creation of useful, open data sets. This is motivated by

1. the increasing reliance of business on large public data;
2. the uptake of open data principles in many vertical sectors, most notably eGovernment, for public or social good, to increase the efficiency of end-user services and enable novel business models; and
3. the need of research communities to make sense out of petabytes of scientific data, to describe and expose this data in ways that encourage and enable collaboration. Research questions relevant to large-scale data management are inherently interdisciplinary; their durable resolution requires the building of bridges between the different research communities that currently exist in isolation from each other.