[Mark Parsons]

Intriguing conversation, gentlemen. Definitely a good case study for the new IG, which I just joined. A long overdue IG, I must say. Thank you Kheeran for setting it up. And thank you Andi for continuing to push us in pragmatic but potentially transformative ways.
cheers,
-m.
Mark A. Parsons
Senior Research Scientist
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
https://tw.rpi.edu
+1 303 941 9986
1550 Linden Ave., Boulder CO 80304, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7723-0950
On 7 Jul 2020, at 19:23, kheerand via RDA-COVID19 wrote:
Hi Andi,
Thank you for clarifying the difference in approaches. From the SDDI-IG perspective, this is a wonderful example of two different approaches to the same problem. The SDDI-IG is looking to compile a corpus of knowledge of such problem-solution patterns, so it would be useful to explore this further with you. As this is off-topic for the RDA-COVID19 group, I will email separately to you to discuss further.
Regards
Kheeran
On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 6:29 PM Andreas Rauber wrote:
Hi Kheeran,
Thanks a lot for the pointer to SAIL and the UKSerP. This infrastructure is, indeed, conceptually very similar to ours – but several orders of magnitudes larger. It very likely took a bit longer to set-up: Some places seem to have been a bit more forward-looking than others in setting up according infrastructures. We, unfortunately, had (and still have) nothing like that in place at this scale.
While setting up a solution like UKSerP was out of the question given the time and budget constraints, we luckily are also facing a somewhat simpler setting with the current project: rather than setting up a central system we want to enable data owners directly to deploy the solution within their own environment – which should make it easier (both from a legal perspective! as well as concerning trust) – to make their data accessible. It also keeps the data where the domain expertise is available. This, however, also limits interlinking between data, integrating data from different sources. But we hope that once trust has been gained in the individual systems operated by the data owners themselves, they will also be more willing to trust a third-party system providing the linkage of data while still keeping the data owners in control.
Thus, I wouldn’t dare to say in any way that we have managed to * solve * the social dynamics. On the contrary, as long as benefits are to be gained from having control over the data, and as long as handing over data to somebody else would risk reducing these benefits, we will see all kind of activities happening to impede access to data. Our hope is that via a bottom-up process institutions can learn about the opportunities, assess the risks that each such infrastructure c! arries, in spite of all protection mechanisms themselves, understand the trade-offs and implications, and to thus gain trust and see the benefits. It’s a rather organic process, allowing institutions (which, in our case, also include industry as a key stakeholder: a lot of data that was relevant in our discussions was commercial data (supply chain analysis, logistics data, etc.) which is held by companies which seem less eager to feed such sensitive data into centralized repositories) to learn from examples and eventually try it themselves. At least that’s our hope and vision in preparing these building blocks and set-up descriptions.
Andi
On 03.07.2020, at 17:32, Kheeran Dharmawardena wrote:
Hi Andreas,
It is great to hear of this initiative and it is truly inspiring to hear that it was conceived of and developed in 2 weeks. Secure analytics platforms such as this is something that is very much needed and fills a gap between the private data and public data.
From what you describe, the model used seems very similar to the SAIL databank platform in the UK. It might be worth reaching out to them to swap notes as well.
I am particularly interested in how you managed to solve the social dynamics of this socio-technical problem in such away that it balanced the various competing social and institutional needs. I’m interested in this because I think it forms a nice case study for the Social Dynamics of Data Interoperability IG. Being able to extract and compile problem-solution patterns for such challenges is something the IG is interested in and would complement and benefit anyone looking to adopt the open source solution that is being funded by the EOSC.
Kind regards
Kheeran
On Fri, 3 Jul. 2020, 6:40 pm rauber via RDA-COVID19, wrote:
Dear colleagues,
Some of you might be interested in this initially ad-hoc activity
emerging from the Austrian COVID19 Future Operations Clearing Board
that is now being supported by the CO-Creationg fund of the EOSC
Secretariat to turn it into a proper and re-usable Open-Source based
solution:
Already very early on during the rise of the COVID19 pandemic, the need
for solid, data-driven decision was recognized. During meetings of the
COVID19 Future Operations Clearing Board, a national expert platform in
Austria, it became evident that access to essential data was missing.
This was primarily due to the impossibility of data owners to share
their data with experts, either due to privacy reasons (medical, social
science), but also due to the massive risk involved in sharing
commercially sensitive data. In order to break this deadlock, TU Wien
within a timeframe of two weeks set up a high-security data
infrastructure and according processes to allow data owners to provide
– highly selective access (data visiting)
– to specific (fine-granular or aggregated, fingerprinted)
subsets of data
– for identified individuals
– for limited periods of time
– to answer precisely defined questions accepted by the data owner
As this infrastructure was set-up and deployed in less than two weeks,
it was obviously highly “handcrafted” and targeted to the specific needs
and local set-up. Yet, the availability of such an infrastructure has
met the interest of several parties who would like to provide such a
data hosting / data visiting solution on their own. We have thus been
granted funding to package and release this infrastructure components
and according documentation to allow other parties to set-up and operate
this infrastructure (or parts of it) in their own environment, thus
being able to maintain complete control over who is able to work with
which parts of their data within their own server infrastructure, and
without having to hand over data to external partners.
More details on this activity will be released via the (currently rather
rudimentary) webpage at
http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~andi/secure_data_infrastructure.html
We are, of course, very interested in feedback on the current
architecture, issues discovered with the architecture, design, and –
once the components are being provided (planed for late summer / early
autumn) – their usefulnees and limitations. If you have any questions,
pleaselet me know.
Best regards,
Andreas Rauber
—
Full post:
https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/rda-covid19/post/high-security-data-pl…
Manage my subscriptions: https://www.rd-alliance.org/mailinglist
Stop emails for this post:
https://www.rd-alliance.org/mailinglist/unsubscribe/70251
—
Full post: https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/rda-covid19/post/high-security-data-pl…
Manage my subscriptions: https://www.rd-alliance.org/mailinglist
Stop emails for this post: https://www.rd-alliance.org/mailinglist/unsubscribe/70251

Discussion