How TRUSTS use cases change the industry

One barrier with high impact in the evolution of data markets is the lack of trust between data aggregators, suppliers and data subjects. There is also a lack of trust in the sharing of data in private and business virtual environments due to the fear of external control or the loss of self-determination through data abuse. Within TRUSTS we frame the theoretical and operational basis for ethical platforms in function of trust and we are creating information, knowledge and transparency. The developments are making data more accessible and exploitable to a wide range of stakeholders, including SMEs.

To derive real-life requirements for the TRUSTS European Data Market and to apply the concepts and reference implementations, the project runs pilots that involve real data value chains with according investment scenarios. Six companies (including two data providers) addressing different use-cases identified as most promising by the consortium, targeting, but not limited to, the financial and operators’ industries:

1. Anti-Money Laundering Compliance

The Anti-Money Laundering (AML) use case aims to demonstrate the capabilities of a data sharing platform in providing faster and more accurate detection of financial crime and how enriched data can be securely brokered to interested customers who need to perform AML checks.

2. Agile Marketing through Data Correlation

Use case two should validate how big data analytics techniques can provide timely and meaningful information towards targeting profitable customers at a local level.

3. Data Acquisition to improve Customer Support Services

The objective of the third use case is to create an out-of-the-box analytics solution for the anonymisation and visualisation of Big Financial Data.

Why are these the most relevant for an EU data market?

The amount of data available and produced every day is exploding. Data has become an important raw material that is of high importance in nearly every industry sector worldwide. Thereby a vital data economy and a successfully working Data-Services Ecosystem in Europe is one of the factors to enable and ensure sustainable employment and growth and thereby societal stability and well-being

To fully unleash the data economy benefits we need to ensure a free flow of data, allowing companies and public administrations to store and process non-personal data wherever they choose in the EU. Therefore, our use cases display three areas where there are challenges with data and data sharing. Take the first use case for example: Financial crime and money laundering offences are on the rise. Many institutions have already automated their procedures, but the current AML systems are mostly rules-based. With increasing numbers of cases, rules-based systems become more complex and with that, an increasing number of cases get flagged for further investigation because of false positive or false negative results. With the AML use case TRUSTS aims to give an opportunity to maximize operational effectiveness to AML detection.

Planning and Setting up the Use Cases (Deliverable 5.1)

In March, the first deliverable reporting on the implementation and testing plan of the TRUSTS use cases has been submitted. It reports the status of the planning, setup and operational management of the demonstration of the TRUSTS platform and summarizes the efforts taken thus far. For example, for each use case test scenarios on a business level are listed defining the scenario steps in terms of the application or service provider as well as the end-user*, like billing and payment, data onboarding and service execution or service usage.

Trials will start in April 2021

Next step will be the actual deployment of the first demonstration phase based on the requirements and conditions that are highlighted along with the available MVP version. During the first testing phase, all obtainable functionalities* e.g., data protection or data as a service and subscribers management will be tested and evaluated.

Deliverable 5.1 is just the start. After every phase of demonstration, the document will be updated at the end of each demonstration phase.  The first trial phase will be between April 2021 and December 2021, the second is planned to be finished by August 2022.

* More information about the Functional Requirements are defined in Deliverable 2.2 and are also presented in the Annex section of D5.1

Author: Gianna Avgousti, eBOS Technologies Ltd, Cyprus

Read more:

• TRUSTS Use Cases
• Deliverable 5.1
• Deliverable 2.2

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© Unsplash/Aaron Burden

In the TRUSTS project, legal and ethical issues arise from the research and innovation activities. Therefore, we analyzed the research ethics principles to address these subjects and introduce the ethical landscape applicable for TRUSTS.

The development, testing and validation must comply with ethical principles to respect the individuals involved and to prevent harm. TRUSTS adheres to the ethics adopted throughout the European Union and embeds it in the planning, development, testing and implementation of its socio-technical solution.

Ethics is a primary concern for researchers. Ethics underlie European law and provide guidance when navigating the ambiguities of legal norms. Ethical standards provide guidelines and should be respected when evaluating and developing new solutions, which may fall in a yet unregulated area, such as AI. Ethics plays an important role when considering the appropriate course of action in conditions of uncertainty.

In Deliverable 6.1 we analyzed relevant sources of ethics obligations such as the H2020 ethics code of conduct and highlighted the areas of concern within the project such as the use of AI systems.

Read Deliverable 6.1 „Research Ethics“

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The Horizon 2020 innovation action TRUSTS – Trusted Secure Data Sharing Space – develops a trustworthy federated platform for personal and non-personal data in Europe. One of the key goals is to enrich existing data marketplaces with new functionalities, targeting both industrial and personal use. This not only creates innovation potentials for current business models, but also generates entirely new business opportunities.

“National projects primarily focus on establishing the basis for a working platform. TRUSTS reviewed the existing data market landscape and solutions, identified current shortcomings and functional gaps as well as best practices regarding organizational, technical and operational aspects, with a special focus on data privacy”, states Gianna Avgousti, R&D Project Manager at eBOS Technologies Ltd and Use-Case-Leader at TRUSTS.

Clarified and concrete requirements for sustainable success

Setting up a European data market requires active exchange between various stakeholders. A clear understanding of the stakeholders’ needs and what they consider valuable and viable for the data marketplace is important. That is why a requirements elicitation process, based on the three TRUSTS use cases, was accomplished to ensure that TRUSTS results are applicable in day-to-day business.

Gianna Avgousti says: “Having the main contributors of two previously established data market platforms in the TRUSTS consortium enables us to leverage, adopt and improve existing components and ensure that the TRUSTS platform can act as a technology leader at European and international level.”

Strengthening Europe’s economy with data-driven innovations

TRUSTS supports the emergence of a European data economy based on secure and GDPR-compliant data exchange. An important goal is to accelerate sustainable innovations and business models so that enterprises can implement them into their processes. This is not only profitable for the businesses themselves but for the entire European business landscape.

“Data has become an important commodity that is of high importance in nearly every industry sector worldwide. To fully unleash the data economy benefits, we need to ensure a free flow of data, allowing companies and public administrations to store and process non-personal data wherever they choose in the EU”, highlights Gianna Avgousti.

Sustain the outcome – focus on practical Use Cases

In a first business validation, a detailed set of measurements of each use case was developed. The partners of the Consortium used those sets in order to validate the progress on the implementation of the project and the overall alignment with the project’s output. The outcome of this first validation provided a solid foundation on which further business analysis will be carried out. In order to continuously maintain the product quality, a second business validation and final round will be performed.

“TRUSTS has the goal to create viable business plans for its defined targets. The business cases and business plans will be strongly informed by the business outcomes of the three use cases, which will provide unique input to the final business plans of TRUSTS”, concludes Gianna Avgousti.

Link to CORDIS

Link to APA OTS

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In line with the European Data Strategy and the concept of common European data spaces, TRUSTS seeks to establish a data platform for secure, trustworthy and GDPR-compliant data exchange. In doing so, it strives for business sustainability to become a viable business partner in the data ecosystem. To set itself apart from other data market infrastructures, TRUSTS focuses on data sovereignty, federation, and interoperability. However, does this suffice for business sustainability? It is definitely not an easy undertaking and requires dedicated exploration as part of the project.

Generally speaking, there are 3 distinct roles to be filled by the emerging TRUSTS platform:

• Data Market
• Data Market Federator (meta-market)
• Ecosystem Facilitator

In its first role as a data market, TRUSTS concentrates on data sovereignty, privacy and security and is planning to set up a data market for both, B2C and B2B. For this purpose, the 3 use cases are being explored in the financial and telecommunication sector, deploying state-of-the-art methods such as federated learning, transfer learning, multiparty computation and homomorphic encryption.

Yet, to achieve sustainability, data markets and platforms strive for richer pools of data assets, that is problem-solution specific data sets and pertinent algorithms and functionalities. A pathway to achieving this is to bring together a multitude of open data cloud systems and large data vendors in common data spaces and an overarching data market to overcome the problem of fragmentation. A data-driven ecosystem is then formed through the inclusion of further stakeholders and innovative data-driven services.

In its second role as a data market federator or meta-data market, TRUSTS brings together several data markets and leverages the experience of the data market projects IDS and DMA. TRUSTS will become

“a platform that fosters value transfer and resource sharing among and across other (same- or cross-domain) individual platforms based on the concept of federation through openness and interoperability endeavours, thus enabling quicker and greater network effects”, Andreas emphasised.

As an ecosystem facilitator, TRUSTS aspires to have a sustainable impact on the EU data economy, while concentrating on interoperability and acting as building block for enacting the European Data Strategy. The consortium partner IDSA already provides a deployed standard (IDS framework) for interoperability, which focuses on a decentralised data infrastructure. This framework of open standards and interoperability can enable TRUSTS to contribute to breaking up legacy- or technology vendor-induced silos by forming the interconnected infrastructure for secure exchange and deployment of data assets.

The data ecosystem does not only include data sellers and buyers. Very much like in a layered model, at the core, there is the transactional data exchange value chain including direct data suppliers, data value distribution channels, and data users. Stakeholders are added in the outer layers. These include among others technology and services providers, research and academia, government institutions or standardisation bodies. “On balance, data providers and data users require enabling players”, Andreas explains.

Taxonomy and business modelling for TRUSTS

After a first wave of mostly failed data markets over the last decade, today, there is a wide range of data marketplaces with very diverse origins, differentiated approaches and value propositions. Each of them has chosen specific pathways to sustainability. TRUSTS does not focus on researching once more those proven business models encompassing proprietary data enrichment and trading, but puts a focus on data markets which predominantly act as intermediaries, facilitators, and brokers to enable decentralised data exchange, while adding rich data processing and transformation functionalities. The required approach of interoperability and decentralisation is fully reflecting the European Data Strategy – “the value of diversity brought together”, Bert adds.

As input to the project, TRUSTS’ consortium partner Delft University of Technology conducted research in data market taxonomies, focusing on business model attributes. The resulting comprehensive framework will be applied in TRUSTS to test and refine business models. “It is like a pre-configured morphologic box for data markets, corresponding to the commonly known business modelling canvas”, explains Bert.

For the webinar, a simplified depiction of standard Business Model Architecture was used to elaborate on the observations current state of business modelling within TRUSTS. It comprises a [1] value creation model (product squared with value discipline, customers and channels), [2] profit model (unit economics based on revenue model and cost structure) and the amalgamating [3] business logic defining sustainability and growth through virtuous cycles.

When exploring these three domains of the business architecture for a basic data market with transaction-based pricing during the Data Market Austria project (2016-2019), it became apparent that this hardly will form a sustainable business model. Next to more refined customer segmentation, e.g. with increased business domain specificity, this takes modular bundling and interoperability of algorithms and components, and not least the complementing components and applications, necessary computing infrastructure and auxiliary services. Building a business model thereby becomes a multidimensional challenge within overlapping competitive environments.

Differentiators and potential USPs

Data is a unique economic good and rarely acts like a commodity in fully transparent markets. The problem of data pricing remains unsolved. Thus, the value of data is highly contextual and usage dependent. Research of German consortium partner Fraunhofer Gesellschaft indicates higher profitability of business models pertaining to data space operations and provision of trusted data services.

To differentiate itself, TRUSTS explores a set of promising differentiating factors – sovereignty and security, federation, and interoperability – corresponding to the three mandated roles of the platform.

In the context of the European Data Strategy, the federation concept for data markets is unique, not only making accessible a profusion of data assets but lifting the interoperability to the next level. The vision of TRUSTS is to become a central venue for data exchange and a new federated data ecosystem allowing the integration and adoption of future platforms, and getting part and parcel of everyday business processes of companies and across industrial value chains.

Originally, data markets focused on the facilitation of data assets trading and could only survive as highly specialised, domain specific niche markets. Simply scaling up data supply and growing into data super-markets catering for all needs was a deadlock.

Bert says: “Over the last five years, the data market landscape has evolved dramatically and became more sophisticated. And there are clear synergies between nimble specialised pools of data assets. The TRUSTS platform could become the equivalent of a data asset mall operator, providing the infrastructure for collaborative data spaces linked to all sorts of specialised providers of data sets and services.”

Bert summarises: “When exploring business model options, we need to move away from an understanding of data-as-a-product, pushed for sales, and rather focus on applied data-as-solution to business problems in coopetitive settings. For this, we need to bring interoperable infrastructure and services into the mix. Only if we take all this together, within an open, well-governed framework, will we make a meaningful contribution to and have an impact on the European data economy.”

How to get involved

To create a sustainable business model of the TRUSTS platform and cater for the requirements of the European data economy, the TRUSTS consortium is inviting interested stakeholders to participate. If you or your organisation want to get involved, support or collaborate with our project, please get in touch. The possibilities are manyfold, ranging from participation in our webinars and podcasts, contributions to our Advisory Board, focus groups and workshops or the exploration of options for using the emerging platform for pilot projects.

We are looking forward to hearing from you: info@trusts-data.eu

If you have missed the webinar, you can find the link on our YouTube channel.

Here you can also find the PPT slides.

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The domains where IDS can be applied to are multiple, going from manufacturing and mobility, to healthcare and agriculture. No limit to the potential of IDS! You can shape your own ecosystem, be it on a corporate level or a multi-corporate level.

• Are you interested in the benefits that IDS can bring to you?
• Are you eager to exploit the IDS technology or do you want to know how you can offer your data services in the IDS-ecosystem?
• Are you just curious about IDS and would you like to find out more about it?

Then join our Consultation Hour! We will tell you more about our association, the value of the IDS initiative and how you can contribute.

Main purpose of the session is to discuss the Data Spaces enabled by IDS and to answer your questions, so do not hesitate to share your thoughts! We are looking forward to it.

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G1 and TU Delft conducted a workshop within the internal consortium on 22 October 2020 to discuss the positioning of the TRUSTS-project in the European data economy. The objective of the workshop was twofold:

1. Solicited perspectives and inputs from TRUSTS consortium partners to position the TRUSTS project in the European data economy
2. Initiated business modeling for trusted secure data sharing spaces

Participants discussed three possible choices of TRUSTS positioning in the European data economy. These are 1) TRUSTS as a data market, 2) TRUSTS as a federator of data markets, and 3) TRUSTS as a data ecosystem facilitator.

First, as a data market, TRUSTS can be viewed as a platform to facilitate data trading (i.e. data exchange and financial transaction) between data providers and data buyers. It will provide fundamental functionalities such as onboarding mechanisms, dataset discoveries, trading arrangements, etc. To date, TU Delft has developed two business model taxonomies to position TRUSTS as a data market (see Bergman, 2020; van de Ven, 2020). The studies have identified value-adding services to attract both data providers and buyers, namely:

1. cleaning data to ensure data quality
2. analysing data to create aggregated datasets
3. offering personal assistance in data sale and acquisition

© mark-fletcher-brown on Pixabay

Second, TRUSTS can also be viewed as a federator of data markets, going beyond the development  of “yet another data market platform.” As a potential federator, TRUSTS will be interoperating with existing data markets (IDS, DMA) and future data markets. TRUSTS will potentially create value by forwarding and connecting data market traffics, gradually  harmonising technology stack through coordination and common standards, and providing non-differentiating capabilities (e.g. billing) as shared-services. One interesting topic raised by a participant was the conceptual form of the federation.

“Which conceptual model will we employ? The federation based on a hierarchal meta-platform or Peer to Peer (P2P) network of data markets?”

The participants discussed that a hierarchical meta-platform would be a starting point for the federation of data markets. Insights from such a meta-platform as well as insights from interoperable industrial data clouds may lead to the emergence of P2P federations of data markets in the more distant future.

Finally, as a data ecosystem facilitator, TRUSTS will be potentially served by taking on one or multiple roles as

• a champion among data markets and propagating federatedness
• an industry association of European data markets by driving standards and shaping policies,
• an innovation hub, providing experimental environment(s) and brokerage of associated services

In general, the workshop participants were aware of these three positionings and had the same perspective that TRUSTS should fulfill the project mandate (i.e. enable interoperability with other data markets). Other interesting topics that need to be further discussed include the identification of TRUSTS’ value proposition, the primary obstacles to the adoption of federation by data markets, the operating company of TRUSTS, etc.

The next step is to develop webinar content based on these workshop results. We will also refine the workshop materials and re-run the refined workshop with participants outside the TRUSTS consortium.

Reference

BERGMAN, R. 2020. A Business Model Taxonomy for Data Marketplaces. Master of Science, Delft University of Technology.

VAN DE VEN, M. R. 2020. Creating a Taxonomy of Business Models for Data Marketplaces. Master of Science, Delft University of Technology.

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Interviewer: Nina Popanton, Data Intelligence Offensive (DIO)

• How will data markets shape the European industry?
• What are the business perspectives of the TRUSTS project?
• What are the benefits and risks?

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December 7, 2020 – Leuven/Vienna. Privacy and data protection supporting the compliance of data sharing with EU rules is a new challenge for our society. A specific legal framework that protects relevant data from unauthorised use but also does not put European businesses at a disadvantage in global competition, is urgently needed. That is what TRUSTS is working on. In the project’s deliverable 6.2. (Legal and Ethical Requirements) the issue of controllership of personal data, the ensuing allocation of data protection responsibilities and the legal basis for processing personal data are determined. It informs about the main concepts of the ePrivacy legal frameworks and their relation with GDPR and provides further conceptual legal information on privacy-preserving techniques that might be relevant for TRUSTS partners, stakeholders as well as the European data community.

The legal patchwork for data transactions

“Industry players are increasingly considering data as a commodity to be traded in their own rights. This is particularly seen in data markets. In addition, there is a growing interest of policy makers in data markets and the exchange of data across industries. Still, the legal framework does not sufficiently address data rights in this respect towards commodification of data,” states Lidia Dutkiewicz, researcher at the Centre for IT & IP Law, KU Leuven.

The legal frameworks have increased over time with various rationales. In contrast, the question of whether and how data could be turned into a tradeable asset is  rather new. Even data as a subject matter is a rather new construct in legal thinking. The patchwork of legal frameworks applying to data (transactions) might make it more difficult to trade data because of uncertainty that it brings about and because of the context-specific nature of legal analysis. This being said, a great array of options can be arranged by transacting parties by means of a contract. “However, a major issue lies in the fear of data providers to lose control over their data upon sharing them. Given the absence of clear rights on data, we will further investigate whether data sovereignty can be a solution without hindering core legal principles,” adds Charlotte Ducuing, researcher at the Centre for IT & IP Law, KU Leuven.

© jpornelasadv on Pixabay

Data markets: step by step into a secure and sovereign future of data usage

Charlotte Ducuing, Lidia Dutkiewicz and Yuliya Miadzvetskaya from the Centre for IT & IP Law, KU Leuven (www.kuleuven.be), analysed the European laws and regulations relevant to the TRUSTS platform, defined legal and ethical requirements and identified potential legal and ethical obstacles. The emphasis of this deliverable was put on the most relevant legal and ethical aspects regarding data markets, data sharing, etc. This should enable important pioneering steps to be taken towards a future with sovereign data use. (see full text of deliverable at the end)

On the one hand, there is no ownership right in general on data in the EU member states. Many of the consulted legal scholars also consider that such an ownership right should not be set up due to the specific nature of data. Therefore, data cannot be sold legally like a table or watch. On the other hand, a variety of legal frameworks may apply to data and data transactions, which is subject to context-specific analysis. To provide a little insight: data protection law is applicable when personal data are processed, copyright protection may apply as well as the legal protection of databases. The dataset may be legally protected as trade secret or otherwise be subject to contractual arrangements such as non-disclosure agreements or limitations of (re)use. In addition, sectoral legislation may determine or lead to various types of obligations relating to data directly or indirectly, including an obligation to provide access for third parties to reuse data or alternatively confidentiality or secrecy obligations, etc.

Strong demand for research remains

Yuliya Miadzvetskaya, researcher at the Centre for IT & IP Law, KU Leuven, concludes: “Whether and how the EU should intervene to regulate data sharing from a legal perspective needs to be further analysed. This lies at the core of TRUSTS interdisciplinary research”.

Please find D6.2 in full length at: https://www.trusts-data.eu/deliverables/

Link to CORDIS

Link to APA OTS

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The document draws inspiration from the FAIR data principles that affirm that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. As follows from the analysis in deliverable D6.2, the current framework for data sharing is a patchwork of various legislative instruments. The lack of coherence, consistency and certainty hinders data sharing across the EU. With the Data governance act, the Commission now seeks to stimulate data sharing and re-use by strengthening trust in data intermediaries and data exchange mechanisms.

The choice of the legal instrument – regulation – is not accidental since in contrast to directives it does not leave margin of implementation to the member states and thus contributes to a better coordination and homogeneity of EU data policies. Risks of divergent interpretations and implementations across the EU are eliminated or at least minimised.

Four areas for EU intervention are identified:

• mechanisms stimulating the use of public sector data which is not open data
• a certification framework for data intermediaries
• measures facilitating data altruism
• an EU-level structure ensuring the coordination of the horizontal data governance framework

© Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

To bring trust to the functioning of data intermediaries, the certification framework will be put in place on a semi-compulsory basis. The monitoring of the activities of data intermediaries is foreseen by the competent authorities of the Member States upon notification. However, the efficiency of certification as a mechanism to bring trust is questionable. It does not seem that it was a considerable game changer under the GDPR or the EU Cybersecurity Act. It remains to be seen whether it will help to cultivate the culture of trust for data intermediaries or Data Altruism Organisations. The understanding of the concept of trust in this context is particularly relevant for our future work in the TRUSTS project which relies on trust as one of the key elements for stimulating data sharing and re-use.

The draft regulation provides for the creation of a European Data Innovation Board meant to ensure the exchange of information and best practices by Member States’ authorities on data altruism, data intermediaries and the use of public data that cannot be made available as open data.

The proposal also identifies certain technical and legal procedural requirements for making available the categories of data held by public bodies that are not open data.

The draft regulation will go through the ordinary legislative procedure and a number of amendments will be certainly tabled by the European Parliament and the Council.  Regardless of how the final legal act will look, it is obvious that the establishment of common rules and practices in the Member States relating to data governance is only a question of time and negotiations.

Author: Yuliya Miadzvetskaya, KU Leuven

Learn more about the Data Governance Act of the European Commission.

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