BDVA Summit June 2015
Session: Standards - an essential foundation for the European Data Economy
Important information
Background
The Big Data Value Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda rightfully identifies standardisation and interoperability as essential for the creation of the Data Economy. The use of open standards allows companies of all sizes to compete in offering services with no vendor lock-in for customers. The World Wide Web is an example of a platform for innovation on the largest of scales, all based on royalty free, open standards. On your desktop, in your pocket, on your TV, in your car - the Web is everywhere - but this is only made possible by a set of underlying standards.
The development of such standards takes time and therefore money. A group of committed and motivated individuals come together to decide how problems should be solved, a process that benefits a far wider group of people. W3C’s biggest working group (the HTML WG) has 397 participants. The number of developers using that standard is measured in millions, the value of businesses that depend on it hardly needs spelling out. What is the best approach to engage with, and grow the standardisation community? How can it be funded? What de jure and de facto standardisation bodies are relevant for achieving global adoption of Big Data technologies in international standards?
The aim of this session is to discuss these questions. The discussion will be lead by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standardisation body for the Web, but representatives of other standards bodies are, of course, very welcome. The session will offer input for mid-term to long-term planning on Big Data related standardisation activities within BDVA.
Objectives
- Gather a critical mass of people interested in standardisation on specific topics.
- Produce clear ROI success examples for standardisation, based on the performance indicators relevant for BDVA.
- Identify a set of standardisation areas for the data value chain, including their current state and future standardisation needs.
- Integration of detailed information on standardisation (relevant organisations, topics) in the update of the Big Data Value SRIA.
- A list of liaisons that BDVA could engage with continuously to assure appropriate standardisation of Big Data technologies.
- Suggestions for future project areas that should engage in standardisation.
Session topics and how to contribute
In the session we will discuss the following questions:
- What is the best approach to engage with, and grow the standardisation community?
- What de jure and de facto standardisation bodies are relevant for achieving global adoption of Big Data technologies in international standards?
- What are examples for successful standardisation, or failure in certain technical areas relevant for the data value chain?
- In which concrete areas of standardisation do you want BDVA to engage? This may include both aspects of technical interoperability as well as e.g. legal interoperability.
Based on your input (see below) we will publish a draft agenda on this page in the next days.
How you can contribute: we hope to see you in Madrid. But we also want to gather input from the standardisation community at large, including people who cannot make it to the summit. If you are interested in contributing to the topic of standardisation in BDVA please fill in this form and provide a short position statement. We will gather all position statements and summarize them after the event. If you explicitly agree, we will also make your statement publicly available.
The session is organised by W3C, but topics are by no means specific to selected standardisation fora. Please fill in the form by 12 June end of business day.
Session structure
- Introduction (Phil Archer and Felix Sasaki)
- Two 5 minute each giving concrete examples: what is the ROI for standardisation?
- Participants introduction (short, only name + affiliation)
- Discussion round one (30-40 minutes): challenges & opportunities & technologies. Main question: what challenges & opportunities, success stories and failures in concrete data value chain related areas do you see for standardisation?
- Areas of interest are e.g. (but not restricted to): data access and data exchange, data curation, data annotation, data enrichment, multilingual repositories.
- Standards may be relevant for all types of experts working with Big Data: 1) domain & knowledge engineering 2) data & analysis and machine learning 3) distributed computing.
- Goal: get 3 medium and 3 long term actions: what standardisation areas should BDVA invest in, and what would be the ROI?
- Lightning talks (15-20 minutes):
- Discussion round two (20-30 minutes): Operational aspects of standardisation
- What is the best approach to engage with, and grow the standardisation community?
- What de jure and de facto standardisation bodies are relevant for achieving global adoption of Big Data technologies in international standards?
- Should BDVA create a standardisation liaison task force that interconnects internally (BDVA work areas) and externally (standardisation communities), with the aim to influence BDVA work items?
The BDVA SRIA on Standards
To trigger the discussion, the below is extracted from the SRIA v 1.0.
Challenges:
- Lack of seamless data access and inter-connectivity, and low levels of interoperability.
- Data is often in silos and data sharing is difficult.
- Lack of standards related to formats and semantics.
Needs for standardisation:
- Development of APIs for data access and data exchange
- Standards to foster data integration and semantic interoperability
- Data lifecycle management
- Data curation
- Data annotation
- Data models and interoperable architectures for different sectors enriched through semantic terminologies
- Standards and multilingual knowledge repositories/sources that allow industries and citizens to seamlessly link their data with others.
For questions on the session please contact Felix Sasaki and Phil Archer.