Combining explorative data analytics, geospatial data, and network science in Python to overview 35k+ EU-funded projects.

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The Horizon 2020 was the EU’s research and innovation funding program from 2014–2020 with a budget of nearly €80 billion, funding research projects across the continent at various scales, covering topics from Anthropology to Particle Physics. As these grants often funded international research, lots of them were awarded to joint efforts of collaborative parties.

On this piece, I aim to explore some basic cross-sections of the moderately wealthy data sets published about H2020 to have a transient overview on how these chunks of EU fundings were distributed across hundreds of actors and lots of of research topics. For that, I’ll use data shared by CORDIS. These data sets, owned by the EU, are authorized under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, providing an awesome playground for anyone involved in explorative data science or EU funding (or each).

In this text, I first conduct explorative analytical steps to capture the key trends of the information set, similar to most funded topics and institutions. Then, I show a fast technique to use Python to create an interactive map visualization highlighting the spatial and funding distributions of the funded organizations. While this map shows each organization as an independent entity, the EU funding schemes are highly built on collaborations. Hence, within the last a part of this text, I construct and visualize the collaboration network of funded entities.

Moreover, this evaluation goals to spotlight the potential of using various branches of knowledge science to investigate the outcomes of large-scale policies and propose the incorporation of data-driven measures for designing higher future policies and monitoring mechanisms.

While the CORDIS website lists greater than 20 different data files, I’ll only concentrate on the parts here.

That contain general H2020 project information, similar to including participating organizations, and project themes based…