NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, 12th OCTOBER 2015; Arjuna Technologies Ltd., a spin-off from Newcastle University, announced today that it would be targeting its recently announced computer software product – Agility DataBroker – at the Smart Cities market , where it sees its software being used to help overcome the politics of data and to accelerate its distribution.
The Smart City of tomorrow will be heavily dependent on the data generated by the Internet of Things, but the data generated by the huge number of sensors and other infrastructure devices being implemented will overwhelm centralized facilities, which are unlikely to be able to translate the volume to pertinent information in a realistic timeframe. Initial analysis and transformation of the raw data has to be carried out nearer to the periphery so that only the relevant data is distributed to the different data beneficiaries. Agility DataBroker, allows for the ingested data to be automatically cleaned, transformed and distributed, and adds a service agreement layer which will help overcome the politics of data that will frustrate many Smart City initiatives.
Smart Cities are not unitary but are federations of cooperating organisations who each have different legislative, process, moral, political and other constraints on how they can share their data. The data generated is often, at present, consigned to data silos with little interaction between those islands of data. The sensors and other devices currently deployed tend to serve a specific purpose for a specific organisation. Energy companies providing city-wide services deploy sensors to monitor flow across their grid, traffic sensors on traffic lights monitor traffic for the Traffic Management Centre, weather sensors provide data for the forecasting services. The Smart City of the future will need to have data from all services to be able to run effectively. If not then how can they know when storms might damage power lines that affect the control of traffic through the city? The fact is that with data the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, as adding more data sets increases exponentially the number of ways in which that data can be combined.
Today these exchanges of data, if they occur at all, are governed by paper-based service agreements which require significant time and effort to implement and change. What is required is a method of federating the data sources and the data beneficiaries so that the sharing of data is controlled through service agreements implemented in software which carries out the policies determined by the data owner in consultation with its users. Because of the ever changing nature of anything driven by humanity, the city will also need to be able to dynamically change those service agreements in concert with the data owners and consumers, rather than relying on lawyers to argue and reargue changes which may result in the opportunity or emergency having expired.
The Agility DataBroker framework allows an organisation to unlock the value of their own data in conjunction with federated data through its controlled consolidation, cleaning, analysis and distribution. It allows for data to be extracted from any combination of data sources, whether they sit in the Cloud or locally, under strictly enforceable, but dynamically changeable service agreements which govern its use and deployment. Agility DataBroker can be used to clean and filter data close to source and distribute it in different forms to authorized recipients so that the appropriate analysts can extract the information they require in an optimal manner.
Steve Caughey, CEO of Arjuna said “Our company has been developing leading edge technologies for nearly twenty years, and we are excited to be able to contribute to the evolution of the Smart City. We believe that Agility DataBroker removes one more hurdle that planners must overcome for the truly Smart City to emerge. ”
Kaynak : 