Romania’s Ministry of Communications and Information Society is launching two “big data” projects to make public services more efficient, improve tax collection and prevent fraud. The ministry wants to build systems that will sift through large amounts of government data, it announced in January, when it signed contracts worth RON 68.2 million (about EUR 13.4 million).

Included in the projects is a plan to improve the IT infrastructure of public institutions to provide access to government data. The projects should be up and running within 36 months, the ministry announced.

The projects are part of a government modernisation programme entitled ‘Programului Operațional Competitivitate 2014-2020’ (“Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020”). The programme focuses on big data, interoperability, cybersecurity and eHealth, and is co-financed by the European Union.

The two big data data projects have been designed after studying national and European best practices, the ministry explains in a 2016 report. A 2015 study by Romania’s Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (Institutul Central de Informatica, ICI) describes a possible IT architecture, outlining the use of a Hadoop distributed computing cluster to store and analyse the data records.

More information:

Announcement by the Ministry of Communications and Information Society (in Romanian)
Big Data study (PDF, in Romanian)