The Athena Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and KnowledgeTechnologies (www.athena-innovation.gr) - ARC is a research and technology body, which wasfounded under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Development in 2001. R.C. Athena participatesthrough the Information Management Systems Institute (IMSI- http://www.imsi.athenarc.gr/). IMSIwas founded in 2007, with the mission to conduct research in the area of data management and largescaleinformation systems. In this small time-frame, IMIS has been established as one of the leadingResearch Institutes in EU in big data and Semantic Web technologies, i.e. the foundations of the dataeconomy. This is apparent in the quantity and quality of scientific publications in these fields, aswell as from the success in obtaining competitive funding from EU and national programs. Morethan 93% of IMIS budget comes from competitive funding (31 active RTD projects). Due to theGreek EC presidency in 2014, ATHENA was the co-organizer of the 2014 European Data forum, anannual meeting place for industry, research, policy makers, and community initiatives to discuss thechallenges and opportunities of data in Europe, especially in the light of recent developments such asOpen Data, Linked Data and Big Data. The key personnel of ATHENA have a long and pertinentexperience in participating in and leading EU projects with an emphasis on topics for Open Data,Big Data management, Cloud technologies and e-Infrastructures.