In the new research and innovation paradigm, aimed at transformation towards more sustainable, inclusive and fair pathways, it is essential to provide monitoring systems and tools to map and understand the contribution of research and innovation policies and projects to address societal and environmental challanges and generating new patterns of specialisation and new trajectories for socioeconomic development. To address these problems, we present the RIS3-MCAT platform, result of a line of work to explore the potential of open data, semantic analysis, and data visualisation, for monitoring challenge oriented smart specialisation in Catalonia. RIS3-MCAT is an interactive platform that facilitates access to R&I project data in formats that allow for sophisticated analysis of a large volume of texts, enabling the detailed study of thematic specializations and challenges beyond classical classification systems. Its conceptualisation, development framework and use are presented in this paper.