Data is an asset that spurs innovation, drives decision making, improves operations and impacts science, environment, health, energy, education, industry, and society in general. Nevertheless, the expanding sea of data remains mostly unexplored and underutilized. The EU-funded DataGEMS project aims to change that by offering a next-generation dataset discovery and management ecosystem that will provide algorithms to make datasets discoverable, combinable and explorable. DataGEMS develops state-of-the-art data management, natural language processing and machine learning technology to discover and analyze datasets of different data modalities such as tabular data, text documents, knowledge graphs, and images. The main goal is to gain new insights into vast amounts of complex, heterogeneous data sets by providing intuitive tools. DataGEMS promotes data FAIRness in key areas such as education, meteorology and linguistics.