Success stories

by OpenXPort team The Challenge Hundreds of millions of users worldwide store their PIM data such as contacts, appointments, tasks, notes, or files on internet services. This is true not only for email or groupware messaging services, but also for Social Networks, CRM systems, … and many other applications. So, what happens to this data when a user decides to change his provider? Many of the most popular Webmail systems have no well-defined APIs and/or data portability support. Thus, millions of email users are involuntary “locked-in” with a service provider. The OpenXPort project helps establishing new standards that simplify the transfer of PIM data. The Solution The OpenXPort project works on open data formats and protocols to improve data portability for groupware/PIM data such as contacts calendars, tasks, notes, and files. The project makes use of audriga’s comprehensive experience in the field of data portability. Audriga provides self-service data portability tooling for many hosting companies worldwide, and assists organizations and ISPs to switch complete messaging or online storage platforms to other solutions. Although important standards like vCard/CardDAV and iCalendar/CalDAV do exist, they have limited use when it comes to data portability as they do not cover all types of data, use complex protocols and lack consistency. For this reason, OpenXPort builds on the JMAP family of standards which have been developed within IETF. JMAP is beginning to replace IMAP (email protocol) and is currently being extended to cover contacts, calendars, and tasks. OpenXPort is engaged in the ongoing standardization and extends Open Source servers with JMAP functionalities. OpenXPort’s JMAP plugins for Roundcube, SqirrelMail, and Horde can already help many of its users to exercise their right to free data portability. They also provide reusable code and blueprints for adding JMAP support to other systems. Besides simplifying the import and export of data, OpenXPort will also improve the overall interoperability between...

by ALIAS team The Challenge Users’ personal data is stored in third-party services they use, historically for convenience, but companies have been using it to develop control lock-in on their users, asymmetry of information and unfair advantages with other platform services. This data is locked in because of the design of the main authorization protocol used on the web, that is OAuth. This protocol enables companies to keep too much power hosting the data associated with the service. Another design, enabled with recent cryptography technologies, would be to reverse it, enabling a user to have a Platform Relationship Management for Personal data, enabling to keep control and visibility at any time. The goal was to decentralize OAuth, enabling this value proposition to be technically feasible, easy to implement by developers and user friendly for citizens. The Solution In the DAPSI programme, we developed a platform enabling users to ask for their data from different data providers and platforms via different means, either email or via a portability chatbot. Once the users got their data back, they are able to share this data with different public research project to “Datafund” them. It contributes to a more human-centric internet, because it puts the user at the centre of the data sharing mechanism and process. Nothing can be done without the user's consent, and everything can be undone by the user. DAPSI support DAPSI has helped us to: - Strengthen the team that started the project - Mature the technology - Turn the project into a company - To get legitimacy in the Personal data ecosystem - Attract investors, private and public DAPSI journey - Achievements from the first phase of the DAPSI programme By helping 50 citizens to get back their data as a research project, we managed to check 400+ current portability legal processes and the real implementation of GDPR article 20 by...

by ORATORIO team The Challenge The European energy sector, and in particular electricity and gas distribution, is currently undergoing major disruptions including deregulation, digitalisation and clean energy transition. While the ongoing investments in the connected energy infrastructure (electric smart meters, electric car charging points, solar panel generators, smart connected buildings...) are very significant, the underlying data portability is still at its infancy at best. The newly promoted European Green Deal, aiming at climate neutrality by 2050, call for almost immediate deployment of new energy data collection platforms, and makes it very urgent to provide necessary interoperability and compatibility solutions. The consumers are not really in control of their smart building, connected car, energy consumption and production data. While privacy regulations (GDPR) bring some transparency of data being stored, it is mostly impossible to migrate data between different service and equipment providers outside of pre-defined eco-systems. The Solution The ORATORIO project brings pragmatic and efficient answers to the data portability, based on open standards, as well the extensive experience of GridPocket team in large scale deployments of digital energy services with electric and gas utilities, as well as many years of applied research of data security, analytics, open data and human acceptance. Oratorio offers a tool that simplifies end-user data exchanges between data utility companies and energy third-party companies. These third parties can offer additional energy services that do not exist on the initial service provider platform. These can be saving energy tools, IoT smart home systems, electric car charging platform or other data services that could strongly benefit the end-user. The utility company can also benefit from the solution by increasing the number of energy services offered through its portal. DAPSI support DAPSI provide co-financing for the project. This co-financing enables GridPocket to dedicate considerable R&D resources during 9 months to the ORATORIO development. Additionally to the financing, DAPSI...

by UI-Transfer team The Challenge Recently, much attention has been given to Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid specification. This is not surprising as the Solid specification is meant to let people easily reuse their data from one party at another party and will thus lead to many positive advancements. However, even though many of those concepts are not new, their application to personal data in organisations is. And, this novelty leads to many unclarities regarding regulation and technical implementations. For example, current legislation like the GDPR is not tailored to the situation that, in the Solid ecosystem, a person can reuse his/her personal data that is currently stored at an organisation (say A) with another organisation (say B) by providing a URI to a set of data values stored at organisation A to organisation B and instructing organisation A to provide continuous (i.e. online) access to organisation B. In addition, for developers, it is not clear how data reuse user journeys should be implemented. The Solution The DAPSI programme allowed us to develop our Data Reuse Kit – an open-source set of artefacts to aid both legal experts and developers to design user journeys to enable data reuse with Solid. By doing so, we make it easier for organisations to make data available for their citizens, customers, employees, … in a structured and accessible way and thus enable ultimate data portability and transparency. DAPSI support DAPSI did not only provide us with the funding to make this project happen, but also helped us with several coaching sessions about business development. In addition, they helped us to gain visibility by regularly involving us in their communications. DAPSI journey - Achievements from first phase of the DAPSI programme In the first phase of the DAPSI programme, we were able to design the legal framework for data reuse using the Solid standard

by DPELLA team The Challenge We live in an era where personal data is being collected at a massive scale like never before. We have a unique opportunity to obtain a vast number of analytics on people's behaviour and use them to bring a human dimension to the Internet's core. How will this vision be achieved if obtaining data insights has no privacy guarantees? Because of being afraid of violating the privacy of customers/citizens, organizations collecting data often resort to creating data silos! In such a situation, valuable data assets might become useless bits. DPella wants to contribute to building a human-centered Internet where sharing data analytics of human behaviour is done without being afraid of violating privacy regulations. The Solution DPella is a company created to unleash the power of analytics on personal data, thus enabling organizations to share the data insights with privacy warranties. DPella's core technology disturbs analytics' results with random noise to protect privacy while providing information about their accuracy. DPella uses a mathematical framework known as Differential Privacy to precise reason about privacy and accuracy trade-offs. Our novelty is a new technique to efficiently calculate the accuracy of data aggregations. DAPSI support Becoming a startup company requires business development. DAPSI provided effective business training methodologies and one-to-one super valuable coaching sessions with great specialized couches that understood our type of business and solution, something challenging to get when talking about deep tech. We also participate in NGI Tetra Bootcamp, where we were trained in design thinking and pitching. Building a deep tech software application requires highly qualified resources that we could afford, thanks to program funding. We also have access to some NGI sponsored exposition by participating in events such as NGI Forum, media coverage in NGI website and social media and of course, we have access to networking with Data Portability...

by PROV4ITDaTa team The Challenge Your personal data is locked in with the web services you use. Solid provides a better way: a decentralized ecosystem where data and applications are decoupled: you can use a meeting scheduling application on top of your contact information managed by a separate address book application. And you can later switch address book applications without loss of data. However, the problem is that we are currently using so many different web services and systems, that our personal data is scattered everywhere. To regain control over our data, we need to access that data and port it to something such as the Solid ecosystem. Doing that for every imaginable service is too complex and too costly to be achieved by any single person or company. The Solution PROV4ITDaTa is a data processing platform to integrate your personal data from existing web services and systems to your personal data stores. Compared to existing alternatives, it is not a one-to-one hard-coded tool, but a platform that can access any data source in any format. Being highly configurable, you can extend the platform to any existing and new data source without needing to invest development time. On top, it is a transparent platform using semantic standards: not only the data that you port becomes interoperable and machine-interpretable, also the configurations themselves are machine-interpretable. As a result, you have full data governance and provenance when processing your personal data with PROV4ITDaTa. DAPSI support Being part of a research centre, our results are largely of an academic nature. DAPSI support has helped us to bootstrap the PROV4ITDaTa platform that integrates our academic products RML.io and Comunica with the Solid ecosystem. We were able to grow our team with a developer focussed on the DAPSI project. DAPSI journey - Achievements from first phase of the DAPSI programme Within...

by DIP – Digital Immunization Passport team The Challenge For decades, governments and health organisations have struggled to digitise health passports and establish secure and trustworthy data exchange between citizens and health institutions. The problems are manifold, but recent developments in identity and credential management and upcoming legislation in data governance enable and require new solutions. For individual people there have been the challenges of sharing their health data from various sources and presenting them in a way which does not unnecessarily compromise their personal data. The Solution Based on self-sovereign identity and MyData principles, we showcased a human-centric model to manage an individual's vaccination status in accordance with NGI's 8 human-centric goals. Specifically, we developed solutions for organisations to create and verify health credentials and share traceable data securely with institutions. Organisations use Semantic Containers to have all required functionality within a single package, and individuals use the OwnYourData Data Vault as their Personal Data Store. Most importantly, however, was using open standards for data exchange to guarantee interoperability with no vendor lock-in for any of the used components.   DAPSI support NGI DAPSI provided an excellent framework for us to deliver the goals set out in our initial proposal. Coaching sessions provided guidance and balanced technical and business aspects for our prototype deliverables. After the first five months, competing against the other funded projects provided a significant milestone and benchmark to complete the Proof-of-Concept. In addition, the positive momentum of being selected to continue to phase 2 allowed us to refine our solution further and gather more feedback. DAPSI journey - Achievements from first phase of the DAPSI programme We designed and implemented digital vaccination records and data exchange in a decentralised and human-centric way. A particular focus was on business, legal and societal aspects when deploying this new technology in a multi-governance environment. We achieved the...