Technical Approach, Core Features and Use Cases - a brief look into TRUSTS at EBDVF22

Gerrit Rosam (Leibniz University Hannover) opened the session: “Real value and real value to share data, to achieve real impact with data spaces and sharing data is hard.” Therefore, TRUSTS aims at building a GDPR-compliant data sharing platform and demonstrate and realise the potential of the TRUSTS Platform in 3 use cases targeting the industry sectors of corporate business data in the financial and operator industries while ensuring it is supported by a viable, compliant, and impactful governance and legal model.

Technical Approach

The challenges TRUSTS is trying to tackle as well as the technical approach were presented by Victor Mireles-Chavez from Semantic Web Company. He gave a quick overview of the elements that make up the TRUSTS platform from a technical standpoint. Some of the design choices behind the implemented architecture were motivated, and the concrete implementations were mentioned. In particular, the different components deployed in a corporate node were explained, as well as their interactions with the pre-existing components that a TRUSTS participant might have already deployed.

The core features of TRUSTS

(Meta-)Data Governance
Datasets and services onboarding functionality and processes
Intelligent data/service exploration and correlation functionality and processes
Data protection
Advanced data analysis based on Machine Learning
Trusted and legitimate data flows

were explained by Ahmad Hemid (Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT) who also showed a demo on how to log in and to create a service within the TRUSTS platform.

The Legal Framework

“The TRUSTS project comes to life in a complex tapestry of existing and envisaged regulatory efforts by the EU to boost the potential of digital markets”, explained Lorenzo Gugliotta (KU Leuven). This creates compliance challenges – related to data protection, platform regulation, intermediation service obligations, ethical AI – but also opportunities to use the approach of TRUSTS to such regulation in order to enhance trust. Via state-of-the-art Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) TRUSTS, combined with federated learning, TRUSTS can enhance trust in data subjects and data holders; via blockchain-based smart contracts TRUSTS can then enhance trust between businesses cooperating through the platform. The legal and ethical assessment of the platform and the three use cases demonstrated, on the one hand, the potential of TRUSTS in increasing compliance with the law; and on the other hand, the need for the legal framework to tackle existing challenges that can still stifle the full untapping of the value of data.

Use Cases & Leassons Learnt

Last but not least, Gianna Avgousti (eBos Technologies), Manos Paschalakis (Relational Technology) and Emmanouil Adamakis (Foundation for Research and Technology) gave insights into the three TRUSTS use cases and the – so far (the trials will end at the end of November) – lessons learnt:

The TRUSTS Platform is an opportunity to securely share and trade data for Anti-Money-Laundering purposes, to maximize operational effectiveness whilst maintaining or reducing costs.
Sharing anonymized up-to-date data in target marketing actions to specific local areas or individuals in a sustainable and GDPR compliant manner was possible with the TRUSTS Platform.
Big data analytics techniques applied on data shared in a secure, sustainable and effective manner can provide timely and meaningful information towards targeting profitable customers
Innovations like smart contracts and recommendation mechanism are important for data exchange and therefore were integrated into TRUSTS platform
TRUSTS platform’s interoperability with open-data libraries and external federated marketplaces were tested with success
New services, like recommender and admin view services give additional value to the platform, facilitating both the platform user and the platform administrator

Identification of a lack of a consolidated, widely viable, secure and GDPR compliant data marketplaces, adequate to benefit various business collaborations
Platform’s security and GDPR compliance needs further assessment
simple-user-friendlieness needs improvement

Thank you to all speakers of the session, to all of the visitors of EBDVF and to the organizers – it was a great pleasure to join the European Big Data Value Forum 2022!