August 26, 2022
Whether reducing emissions by adapting traffic lights or warning citizens early on in the event of environmental disasters: Digitalization offers cities and regions almost infinite creative possibilities for sustainable urban design through the self-determined and strategic use of urban data. In theory. If it weren’t for the old hurdles when it comes to sovereign and secure data exchange. Data exchange, particularly between public authorities, municipal companies and service providers, is usually severely restricted and often takes place spontaneously and in a disorganized manner. A new approach will soon provide a tool for simple data sharing for municipal stakeholders: the data room.
“The administration in particular has reservations about sharing data for urban design projects with other organizations. After all, it is often sensitive information that the wrong hands can do a lot with. And this stands in the way of sustainable innovation in many places,” says Alanus von Radecki, CEO at DKSR. This is because transferring data across organizational boundaries is often useful and necessary to fully exploit its potential – for example, if a municipality wants to quickly use sensor data from vehicles for a local heavy rain warning via the municipal app. If the car company wants to share the desired data, it must be able to guarantee that no information falls into the wrong hands once it has been made available. In return, the company may want to know from the city how many citizens are using the service via the city app – for which the public sector will certainly have to provide data. At the same time, each of the parties wants to keep track of who is doing what with the data they have provided. The data room solution as an answer to these challenges has so far been more theory than practice. DKSR now wants to implement it. But what do we actually mean by a data room?
For more sustainable innovation: Forward into the data space
Data space: sounds pretty far-fetched to smart city stakeholders who aren’t completely blind to the business side of things. The German translation “Datenräume” (“data spaces”) doesn’t make it any better – and definitions such as those by expert Boris Otto from Fraunhofer ISST seem very abstract in their scientific nature to the non-Boris Otto average citizen. The most important thing in an attempt at a tangible summary:
- Data rooms are technological architectures that are not used to merge data from different sources – but instead leave the data at its source despite being provided by different organizations in one room. There is no fixed target structure.
- This is achieved by only sharing metadata (i.e. information about the data) where the data itself is behind a usage restriction.
- Thanks to a standardized structure and standardized terms, the data room creates a uniform understanding of the data for all systems involved.
- Data rooms are nested within themselves and can overlap. Data available there can therefore also exist twice or three times.
Data rooms also generally have authentication options to identify the parties involved – and thus provide everyone with an anchor of trust as to who they are really dealing with.
Still a concept or already tried and tested?
The “International Data Spaces” (IDS) initiative is driving forward the use of data spaces on the basis of a reference architecture model, a kind of ideal model for data space architectures to be built in the future, which twelve institutes of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft have jointly developed. The Mobility Data Space, which has been offering a data space as an exchange location for around 200 mobility companies since January 2022, is also based on this model. Data spaces with a focus on mobility are already a reality in the business world. In other words, although you can’t touch them directly, you can experience what they are used for. The benefits of this can be seen in mobility apps, for example, which can obtain data from e-scooters, rental cars and cabs, link it together and process and display it for users in order to make getting around a city or region as quick and convenient as possible. The sticking point for intelligent urban design is that the whole thing has so far only been designed for industry and for exchange between companies. As far as easy-to-use data rooms for the public sector with a focus on different areas and a mere interface to the private sector are concerned, there is currently no sign of them: Where is data from health, the environment and other areas being linked to improve services of general interest in local authorities? At the same time, there is currently no space that enables local authorities to exchange data in a protected manner at a local level and ensures that valuable personal information units are not directly monetized and commercially exploited. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely such data spaces that are needed for the comprehensive utilization of data from a wide range of organizations: So that everyone can pull together to meet the challenges of the 21st century and create sustainable smart living spaces for citizens.
Secure use of the entire range of data
And this is where the partnership between the Fraunhofer FOKUS piveau project and DKSR with its Open Urban Data Platform comes into play. Among other things, the piveau data management ecosystem offers an open source data portal that is available to the administration for managing data. “Similar to data platforms, data portals serve the purpose of making data usable. Unlike the DKSR platform, the focus here is more on non-real-time data – this can be a wide variety of static data on investments, construction projects, water, waste and much more,” explains Jens Klessmann, head of the relevant department at Fraunhofer FOKUS. “The portals give citizens access to important information about their city or municipality with maximum transparency.” The European Union is one of piveau’s customers. It manages data with the support of technology via the official European data portal. The partnership with piveau adds a key component to the DKSR data platform approach: where the DKSR platform previously “only” processed real-time data, cities and regions can now also tap into the entire space of non-real-time data for municipal processing. “In practical terms, this means much greater scope for analysis and significantly more options for specific use cases,” says data usage expert Klessmann. “For example, when static data on the location of trees, so-called tree registers, are linked with near-real-time weather and sensor data in order to optimize irrigation systems via apps or more efficient routes for irrigation vehicles.”
Next stop: Data space for sovereign smart cities
And what does the partnership have to do with data spaces? Simply explained: the combination of data portal and platform offers even more possibilities – it becomes an instrument for the management of urban data spaces. After linking the architectures of both platforms via a module, a comprehensive roles and rights concept is added. On this basis, data can be processed jointly between the city, administration, municipal companies and service providers: self-determined, traceable and without data falling into the wrong hands. “We are providing a simple and legally compliant framework for a whole new level of innovation among municipal players. And we can also support local authorities in making as much data as possible publicly available in accordance with the Data Use Act,” says von Radecki, who is visibly pleased about the collaboration. “The next development phase of the project will start soon – and we are full of enthusiasm!”
All advantages of the piveau data portal can already be used via DKSR – information on the offer can be found here. If you have any questions, please contact us at any time!