Becoming Dataware

Horizon, and the Digital Economy programme generally, talks freely of “your personal contextual footprint”, “owning data”, and “exploiting the value in your data”, as if these concepts were well defined and widely understood. Unfortunately, they are not – how personal data should be treated, what specifically is your “digital footprint”, and how it can be valued and exploited are all open questions. Previous work in the Personal Containers project designed the Dataware framework within which “your data” can be seen more as a service than a good. This project will explore these notions further, expanding techniques and technology, and exploring the behavioural psychology of ownership of personal data.

Managing your personal contextual footprint remains a core theme within Horizon. Initially explored within the Infrastructure pilot, and subsequently developed through the Personal Containers project, the current status is that we have described and implemented early prototypes of components in the Dataware framework. Simultaneously, the Homework project has developed a novel home routing platform that enables more intuitive, more capable home network management through manipulation of network traffic flows.

Building on both of these infrastructure technologies, this project has three aims:

1. To investigate the novel features of the Dataware platform from a behavioural perspective;
2. Informed by this, to develop and extend the Dataware technology with the intent of a first deployment; and
3. To use this framework and technology to explore more general features of the psychology of “owning”/controlling access to personal and private data.

The specific real-world data types to be incorporated include home energy and network usage data, collected and managed via a Dataware-enabled Home Information Hub based on the Homework home router platform.

Check out the Becoming Dataware Video