Happy “back to school"!
By Santiago Cáceres Elvira
Happy “back to school"! The new school year sometimes means new faces, and so it is with DATAMITE. I am Santiago Cáceres, project manager from ITI in Spain, and it is truly an honour to coordinate such an exciting project as DATAMITE, with its fantastic team comprising 26 different organisations from 11 countries.
The Consortium has been working on DATAMITE for over nine months, and I must point out that its objectives are even more relevant than when defined over two years ago at proposal time.
While organisations are aware of the enormous potential of data and its value, it is hard for them to extract it for several reasons (lack of resources, technological skills, and sharing culture, among others). Figures are precise: around 65% of data is never used for analysis, and 95% of organisations suffer from the data decision gap.
DATAMITE aims to directly impact those figures by providing its modular open-source platform and training material, paving the way to a more data-driven industry and economy.
Let me finish this short introduction by letting you know that we will be sponsoring the European Big Data Value Forum 2023, to be held in the beautiful city of Valencia. I invite you to join our “Empowering Data Spaces through New European Research Projects / Data Economy through Emerging Technologies: AI, Data Trading, and Interoperability” session on Thursday, 26th October, and visit our booth to learn more about our developments.
The hard work continues! Thank you for joining us and enjoy reading our newsletter!
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Use Case: Connecting eDWIN to data markets
In the agri-food domain, food safety and quality are essential. Digital revolution provided a lot of opportunities for monitoring and optimising the processes in the whole food production chain. The innovative services, more and more AI- based, require high quality of data but also a wide range of the trusted data sources from different providers. Not surprisingly, one of the main objectives of the European Commission's digital agenda is to establish common data spaces where a multitude of public and private companies in the same sector can store and share quality data to drive both an improvement in the quality of life and in the European economy.
One of DATAMITE's objectives is to support the deployment of these common European data spaces through its innovative modular, open-source and multi-domain Framework to improve data monetising, interoperability, trading and exchange.
Connecting eDWIN to data markets Use Case: a unique opportunity to test the DATAMITE framework
To be able to measure the value offered by the DATAMITE framework it is ideal to be tested over an actual use case where, despite the large amount of data already in operation, it is evident that secure data exchange between public institutions and the commercial sector needs to be enabled to enhance data monetisation. eDWIN, a national platform for farming guidance in Poland, operated by WODR and PSNC, fulfils all the necessary requirements to be one of the Use Cases of the project.
eDWIN is a crucial element of the country's sustainable agriculture strategy, supporting mostly farmers and advisors. In addition to data contributed by farmers -such as food origin produced in a given farm- it integrates information from meteorological ground stations providing agro-meteo data and statistical information, a Farm Management System, and ground-based observations of disease and pest occurrence. However, eDWIN's reliance on public institution data and services limits its offerings to farmers, as many essential services come from the commercial sector.
The current roadmap for eDWIN emphasises the need to enable secure data sharing to potentiate data monetisation, ensuring interoperability and quality of data for comparison and validation, data fusion and data reliability for use in decision support services. An ideal scenario to test DATAMITE's governance, quality and exchange modules and to position eDWIN at the forefront of the agri-food sector by offering the highest quantity and quality of data to its users.
The DATAMITE framework: a key piece for connecting public and private data services
The scope of the pilot is to utilise the DATAMITE framework to overcome the challenges faced by eDWIN in relation to the lack of available data as it relies mostly on data provided by users and different public services. The DATAMITE framework should provide several key mechanisms necessary for the implementation of an AgriDataMarketPlace pilot integrated with eDWIN so it can be exploited by all its customers, and by companies building services on top of it.
DATAMITE governance and quality modules should help to improve data management, and quality standards and validation of the acquired data. The sharing module should also provide mechanisms to smoothly publish data into the Marketplace in a secure way as well as keeping control over the data through its data sovereignty component, enabling the definition of sharing policies. It should also provide accounting mechanisms to facilitate data trading and billing.
Impacts beyond the use-case scenario
The developed pilot is an example of public-private partnership, where the data coming primarily from the public institutions can be reused to provide better services for farmers and to generate more revenue in the commercial sector, in particular SMEs that are more open for data sharing.
The outcome of the pilot will help build the Data Space in Agriculture in Poland, enabling more easy collaboration for the whole ecosystem. Pilot outcomes can also be applied in other regions in Europe, thus contributing to the common European data space for agriculture announced and under development by the European Commission.
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Use Case: Corporate Multi-Site Data Exchange
The constant increase in data today makes it impossible for companies - regardless of size - to ignore the enormous potential of data monetisation to increase profits and even expand their markets. Data monetization is the process where company-generated data is used to create a measurable economic benefit, explains Talend.
While it is most common when one hears about data monetisation to imagine companies selling the data they generate to third parties, there is also great potential for data monetisation in the internal use of data to improve services already provided or to create new ones. However, when the company that wants to use its internal data is a large company with numerous subsidiaries, data monetisation faces a major obstacle: the complexity behind multi-site data exchange.
OTE Multi-Site Data Exchange Use Case: a unique opportunity to test the DATAMITE framework
To be able to measure the value offered by the DATAMITE framework it is ideal to be tested over an actual use case that combines data from different data platforms and systems and has real business value for the organisation. OTE, the largest mobile network operator in Greece, fulfils all the necessary requirements to be one of the Use Cases of the project.
Currently OTE subsidiaries have their own data repositories that mainly ingest, store, process and analyse their own datasets. When a subsidiary needs information that is not part of its own business, a data exchange process is initiated to request data based on business need. Overall data exchange process is lengthy, complex and resource demanding, resulting in data and process duplication, increased delivery times, and development and operational efforts.
The DATAMITE framework: a key piece for exchanging data between different data lakes within the same company
The scope of the pilot is to utilise the DATAMITE framework to overcome the challenges that OTE faces concerning intra-corporate data exchange between different subsidiaries of OTE Group of companies, allowing building a convergent customer view and building on top of this reporting and analytics solutions.
DATAMITE framework will produce an efficient data exchange process, by creating a metadata repository reducing complexity of governing data, allowing users to have uniform, fine grain and rule based security controls, as well as, providing a global point to define quality rules. Moreover, during the pilot, the Data Governance module of DATAMITE will enable business and technical users to have a common understanding of business terms across different data sources.
The Data Quality module will also allow users to feel confident to use available datasets, knowing that required quality and freshness rules have been implemented and the data to be used meet the needed standards, while, Access, Security and Data Sharing modules will ensure that data will be shared across data platforms in a secure and reliable way having a common data model, where mandatory regulations (GDPR) and organisation policies (including privacy and security) have been implemented across platforms and data accessed based on a centralised approach.
One of the main challenges of the use case is to combine information from numerous data sources to calculate needed datasets and features that will be used in the analysis phase of the project.
Impacts beyond the use-case scenario
The developed pilot could be leveraged by the organisation to expand it in the full scale of the use case (using all needed data sources), utilised in other use cases with similar data needs and support execution of ad-hoc analysis and visualisations allowing the organisation to perform self-service reporting and analytics.
Pilot setup can also be exploited in other similar organisations (either in telecom industry or other industries with similar data needs) reducing time to deliver and expand data democratisation.
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How DATAMITE will contribute to unlock the potential of data
In an increasingly data-driven world, organisations are realising the immense potential of data monetization. By harnessing the power of data, businesses can gain valuable insights, make informed decisions, and even create new revenue streams. According to Gartner Glossary, data monetization, refers to the process of using data to obtain quantifiable economic benefit data by transforming it into actionable insights, products, or services.
With the EU's strong emphasis on data protection, privacy and trust in voluntary data sharing through regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the Data Governance Act (DGA), the data landscape has undergone significant transformations. However, as organisations adapt to these regulations, they are also discovering innovative ways to unlock the potential of their data assets.
DATAMITE is designed to revolutionise the European data market by helping users who want to better monetise their data and become the leading edge of the data monetisation.
Trends and Opportunities in the EU
Compliance and Ethical Considerations
The GDPR has played a crucial role in shaping data monetization practices in the EU. It has created a foundation for data protection and privacy, ensuring that data is collected, processed, and shared responsibly.
In this context, DATAMITE is one step ahead and its multidisciplinary team includes two companies in charge of this trend. The Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) ensures that the whole process of developing the framework is carried out with a high focus on Social Sciences and Humanities that goes beyond the monetary aspects. Law and Internet foundation (LIF), on the other hand, ensures that all activities developed within the project are legally and ethically aligned with the European regulatory framework and principles.
Collaborative Data Partnerships
As data becomes increasingly valuable, organisations are seeking partnerships to pool their resources and create more comprehensive datasets. Anytime two companies combine their data-driven insights to create new value, we are seeing data collaboration in action. Despite the enormous value of creating a partnership, companies or public bodies should always bear in mind the above point about data privacy. “In the modern world where privacy and security are of monumental importance, the methods companies use to collaborate around data are more important than ever”, reminds the Data Collaboration Guide.
The DATAMITE project as a whole is a good example of the benefits of collaborative data partnerships, with more than 20 organisations participating in its development, sharing knowledge on data storage, security and exchange. And, in particular, its use cases seek to realise the full potential of multi-site data exchange and data exchange between service providers and dataspaces.
Improving data quality; a must for data monetisation
To derive meaningful insights, data must be of high quality, accurate, and reliable. According to the publication Data.europa.eu data quality guidelines, poor quality data is a major barrier to data reuse. This is not new, since 2021 the Open Data Maturity assessment showed that, out of all the parameters it takes into account, EU countries scored lowest on Quality. Yet there is still much room for improvement in this field.
DATAMITE recognizes the critical role of data quality in successful data monetization, and is fully committed to improving it. As Liliana Beltrán, Specialist in positioning and Data innovation ecosystems at ITI - Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, on behalf of the project said at the Data Week 2023: “We firmly believe that to embark on a new era of the data economy, it is crucial to prioritise efforts in enhancing data quality. High-quality data is a fundamental aspect of successful data monetization”. By prioritizing efforts to enhance data quality, the project aims to overcome the barriers posed by poor data quality and promote the reuse of data.
DATAMITE: Empowering European Companies in Data Monetization
In the context of this evolving landscape, the DATAMITE project emerges as a game-changer, empowering European companies to improve data monetization, interoperability, trading, and exchange at both internal and external levels.
To support internal improvement, DATAMITE provides users a collection of open-source modules to enhance their data quality and trustworthiness, as well as Tech training material to upskill personnel. But also, from a data economic perspective, DATAMITE provides EU companies strategies to improve data monetization and mechanisms to quantify the value of their data.
At an external level, DATAMITE ensures that users retain control over their data, enabling them to explore new sources of revenue and foster interactions through Data Sharing and Sovereignty Mechanisms.
In summary, by adhering to FAIR principles and providing data owners with tools to secure and reliably share quality data, DATAMITE boosts data economy. Through this initiative, European organisations can harness the power of their data assets, drive innovation, and explore new sources of revenue in the evolving data economy.
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Project cluster: HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-04
One of the main intentions of DATAMITE is to harness the multiplier capacity of initiatives advocating for the data economy. The more the merrier. That is why the project leverages the consortium’s leadership and participation in active ecosystems to create synergies, bridging the collaboration across the data value chain.
DATAMITE exploits the leading position of the consortium to nurture strategic synergies, creating visibility and fostering adoption of the open-source modules among the major EU ecosystems. Rather than building a small-scale silo, the project addresses and influences well-established communities. Special attention to build technical and promotional synergies with the project cluster under the same topic: HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-04: Technologies and solutions for data trading, monetizing, exchange and interoperability (AI, Data and Robotics Partnership).
FAME: Federated decentralized trusted dAta Marketplace for Embedded finance
FAME [Federated decentralized trusted dAta Marketplace for Embedded finance], is a joint effort of world-class experts in data management, data technologies, the data economy, and digital finance to develop, deploy and launch to the global market a unique, trustworthy, energy-efficient, and secure federated data marketplace for Embedded Finance (EmFi). The FAME marketplace will alleviate the proclaimed limitations of centralized cloud marketplaces towards demonstrating the full potential of the data economy.
FAME will become operational in a federated cloud environment with multiple providers of EmFi data assets, including datasets, AI/ML models, and more. It will become interconnected with more than 12 data marketplaces that will support the implementation of 7 pilots. Furthermore, FAME will establish a Learning Center (LC) for tech and non-tech users, as this is a key prerequisite for unlocking the potential of the data economy.
PISTIS: Promoting and Incentivising Federated, Trusted, and Fair Sharing and Trading of Interoperable Data ASsets
PISTIS [Promoting and Incentivising Federated, Trusted, and Fair Sharing and Trading of Interoperable Data ASsets] brings forward a reference federated data sharing/trading and monetisation platform for secure, trusted and controlled exchange and usage of proprietary data assets and data-driven intelligence. PISTIS will advance the available techniques and technologies, such as federated data discovery and sharing, DLTs, data non-fungible tokens (NFTs), AI-driven data quality assessment and monetisation, to build trust among stakeholders and assuage their concerns. Such stakeholders will formulate a distributed network of existing and new data spaces with built-in governance brought by PISTIS to eliminate silos while accruing the actual data value and multiplying it through derivative assets in a fair and transparent manner.
UPCAST: Universal Platform Components for Safe Fair Interoperable Data Exchange, Monetisation and Trading
UPCAST [Universal Platform Components for Safe Fair Interoperable Data Exchange, Monetisation and Trading] provides a set of universal, trustworthy, transparent and user-friendly data market plugins for the automation of data sharing and processing agreements between businesses, public administrations and citizens. Their plugins will enable actors in the common European data spaces to design and deploy data exchange and trading operations guaranteeing automatic negotiation of agreement terms, dynamic fair pricing, improved data-asset discovery, privacy, commercial and administrative confidentiality requirements, low environmental footprint, as well as ensuring compliance with relevant legislation and ethical and responsibility guidelines.
Four real-world pilots across Europe will operationalise a set of working platform plugins for data sharing, monetisation and trading, deployable across a variety of different data marketplaces and platforms, ensuring digital autonomy of data providers, brokers, users and data subjects, and enabling interoperability within European data spaces.
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How will we contribute to the EU Year of skills?
Following the announcement by President Ursula von der Leyen in her last State of the Union speech, 2023 is the European Year of Skills. The main objective of this year is to help companies, in particular small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to address skills shortages in the EU. As the European Commission highlights, having a workforce with the skills that are in demand contributes to sustainable growth, leads to more innovation and improves companies' competitiveness.
In the current world, characterized by concern for the environment and the digital revolution of the industry impacting all economic sectors, the twin transition (green and digital) opens unprecedented opportunities for people and the EU economy. DATAMITE, well aware of the need to improve society digital skills will contribute to upskill on technical and business aspects thanks to the multiple open-source training materials the project will generate.
The Digital Economy and Society Index shows that 4 out of 10 adults and every third person who works in Europe lack basic digital skills. This represents a huge loss of workforce and therefore a loss for the European economy. The European Year of Skills is part of the Europe’ Digital Decade (2020 - 2030) and the 2030 Digital Compass, which targets of at least 80% of adults with basic digital skills and 20 million employed ICT specialists in the EU. DATAMITE has as its core to improve users digital skills to facilitate the monetisation of the European enterprises and public administrations’ data.
DATAMITE delivers a modular, open-source and multi-domain Framework, to improve Data Monetizing, Interoperability, Trading and Exchange, in the form of software modules, training and business materials for European companies, empowering them to become new relevant players in the data economy. According to the 2030 Digital Compass, 75% of EU companies should use Cloud, AI, and/or Big Data by the end of the decade. DATAMITE’s framework is designed to overcome these challenges helping the European companies to unleash the monetization potential of their data by developing a set of key modules:
- Data Governance.
- Quality.
- Security.
- Sharing.
- Supporting Tools.
DATAMITE will contribute to improve European digital skills and the European high-tech business potential by unleashing the monetisation potential of Big Data at two levels: internal and external. At an internal level, users have tools to improve the quality management of their data, the adherence to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, and can upskill on technical and business aspects.
At an external level, keeping users in control of their data provides new sources of revenue and interaction with other stakeholders. In addition, the architecture envisioned for DATAMITE enables DIHs sandboxing, becoming a potential instructor on their onboarding of SMEs and low-tech SMEs into the data economy.
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#WomenInScience: Meet Daniela Greven
Every 11th of February the world hosts the International Day of women and Girls in Science. This milestone is a celebration but, moreover, it is a reminder of the need to achieve equality in STEM in order to not miss any possible talent. “A significant gender gap has persisted throughout the years at all levels of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines all over the world. Even though women have made tremendous progress towards increasing their participation in higher education, they are still under-represented in these fields”, says the UN.
The DATAMITE consortium is well aware of the reality of inequality in the STEM sector and fully supports the integration of gender and diversity analysis in research activities to achieve the most complete results that include all the parts that make up the reality of society. All activities conducted in DATAMITE take the measures necessary to ensure all members of the society benefit equally from the project outputs.
To learn more about women in STEM and how girls can be encouraged to choose this career path, we talk to Daniela Greven, member of DATAMITE on behalf of FIR an der RWTH Aachen, and leader of the Work Package 4.
When and why did you decide to dedicate yourself professionally to science or tech?
I became interested in natural sciences at an early age and quickly found my strengths there as well. When I was about 14 years old, I interned at an engineering office in my hometown. From then on I knew that I wanted to be an engineer!
As a woman, do you think it is important to have female references when choosing the professional path?
My role models are not only purely female. However, it definitely gives me a boost in this very male-dominated domain to see how other women are following or have already followed a similar path to mine. It is inspiring what some women have already achieved and built up in their careers. Every day each one of us goes new ways and talking about it encourages one another again and again to try something new, outside the traditional way.
How do you expect working at DATAMITE impacts your career?
Within DATAMITE, I will be able to dive deeper into the area of data exchange and technical platform building and look at the interconnection and interdependency in relation to the business model than ever before. This will allow me to better understand and support the cross-sections working on technical solution building in the future. In addition, working in our very interdisciplinary team from all over Europe offers the chance to gain a higher understanding of cultural differences and uniqueness, which will become a core asset for the ever closer European collaboration.
What advice would you advise to any little girl who is thinking of studying something related to science or tech?
Don't let anyone tell you which path to take. Learn to value your interests and individual strengths. Bringing in a new, female perspective often opens the door to a completely new range of opportunity. You can do anything YOU want.
In DATAMITE we celebrate and value the work of all the women who have decided to dedicate their path to STEM. We also want to encourage all the little girls who want to become scientists or engineers in the future.
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Welcome! We invite you to make some puzzles!
By Jordi Arjona Aroca, the DATAMITE Coordinator
Think of a puzzle. If you have little girls, like I do, you have a 100 pieces Elsa and Anna in front of you, but that is a different story. Each one of those 100 pieces is a data fragment. By themselves, they probably mean nothing or have no purpose. However, it is when we put them together, that we create an image, something valuable. Making the puzzle is usually straightforward, might take longer or not, but you have a perfect group of pieces, that match and complement and will let you extract some added value, conclusion, or Frozen picture. Now well, problems come if your daughters mixed three puzzles, took 20 pieces at random to see whether they float in the tube, and a couple more to see how they taste. Now you have more data that you really need (say 300 pieces), although your data is incomplete (remember those 22 fallen pieces), and you better forget of ever seeing that picture complete again.
These are examples of the challenges organizations face with their data. Organizations tend to store data that they will never use, maybe because it is not well described, or because it is not findable or not usable. In addition, these data usually have problems: it may not be complete, there may be outliers, there can be different ways of denominating the same information, ... basically, you do not have a 100 pieces puzzle. Moreover, in general, organizations have large quantities of data, but it is not good data. This has a critical consequence; it is extremely hard to monetize it.
Organizations need tools that allow them to easily enrich their data with metadata, uniformly, so non-technical personnel can easily find it, use it and consume it. They also need tools to ensure that data is good and, otherwise, be able to identify its issues and solve them. It is equally important to define security policies that ensure that only those who are allowed can access the data and avoid security breaches. Then, once you can ensure these aspects, you will be able to rely on your data and think of monetizing it, exploiting it internally, creating reliable models or projections that help boosting your revenues. Moreover, you may even think of sharing or trading it with third parties, but here, again, you must be able to define and enforce terms of use, which is not trivial at all. Of course, assuming that you have technical and business personnel that know how to handle your data.
Currently, we have tools that may aid in these purposes... but do not cover the whole span of needs organizations have. Furthermore, most of them will imply the payment of a hardly affordable, specially for SMEs, license. Open-source tools can help with some of the needs, but we do not have a framework that can help the organizations making up the European productive fabric.
DATAMITE is here to help. During our project we will create an open-source modular framework covering aspects related to data governance, quality, security, and sharing, mainly. Jointly with this, we will foster the creation of an open-source community around the project and produce, within, technical and business training materials with the mission of upskilling EU data professionals and assisting on increasing the maturity level of companies. To do so, we have put together a great and well-balanced consortium, led by ITI and composed by 26 partners of 12 countries. To validate our approach, we will deploy 6 different pilots in different environments (e.g., industry, energy, agrifood, meteo) and with different goals, such as sharing data in Data Spaces, with the EU AIoD or in EOSC, improving how data is consumed within large companies or how it can be offered to EU researchers.
Do you want a bunch of pieces? If you prefer a puzzle, stay tuned!
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