Data sharing between 40 different parties
AMdEX has achieved many milestones via its usecases. In a series of articles, we’ll look back on these results and showcase their user scenarios. This article describes the smart building usecase.
The H20 Esports Campus in Purmerend is equipped with dozens of sensors. The owner of this smart building wanted an app that discloses the sensor data to employees of the building’s cleaning company. This sensitive data offers information about the building’s occupants and its use. Hayo Schreijer – managing director of Dexes and AMdEX founding partner – tells all about this usecase.
Hayo Schreijer
What was the objective of the usecase?
“To research the exchange of sensitive data in a data space that has both public and private data owners and data users.”
What were the biggest challenges?
“The large number of parties involved, requiring many legal questions to be settled. We were working with the owner of the building, the tenants, the sensor owners, the sensor installers, the developers, the cleaning company, and others. We had to make agreements with every single party. We also needed super easy access to the sensor data because it was going to be used by the cleaning crew whose composition changes daily. And there were practical issues because sensors are owned by different companies. We could not just connect the soap dispenser to the company WiFi, because the soap dispenser was not an employee of the company. And of course, we were dealing with sensitive data, that cannot be shared casually.”
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What were the main lessons learned?
“It takes a great length of time to figure out how to translate agreements between people to exact rules than can be read by machines. This was especially complicated when dealing with 40 different parties. It also takes time to change the way people think about data sharing. The developer had never worked with decentralised data, with the app exchange data straight from the source.”
How can the results of this experiment be applied further?
“We have shown how different companies can work together. We also learned that iSHARE is a perfect complement to deliver interoperability to the AMdEX framework. We are definitely using both in the Dutch Metropolitan Innovations (DMI)-ecosystem we are currently involved with.”
What user scenario did you encounter in this usecase?
“A building owner wants to share sensitive sensor data with a cleaning company to offer the best liveable office spaces to its tenants. The tenants are the actual entitled party of the data that is produced by the various sensors in the building. The building owner is a provider of the collected data from the infrastructure of the building. All sensor data stream to the Internet of Things (IoT) network of KPN – the first service provider involved in the user scenario. The next service provider is Luminis that picks the data stream from the IoT databus. Luminis offers a standardised data stream on the Dexes dataspace. A data consumer application, built by FacilityApps, picks up the standardised stream as soon a data user opens the cleaning planning app on their mobile phone. The sensor data from the building is pulled from the Luminis platform as soon as the user has identified him- or herself. With every exchange-event of data in the above scenario, the iSHARE satellite is checked for permission to exchange.
What are the recommendations for future research or experiments?
“We could really use templates or standard agreements that we can teach the machines with. So, when someone else has a building with sensors, we can say: we have done this before, here are the agreements that are necessary in your situation.”
Text: Karina Meerman
Deliverables smart building usecase
The software is not yet a publicly available as a download or application.
Read more about the smart building usecase.
