Data Innovation: Deutsche Telekom making data available as a raw material

Data is the raw material of the 21st century. Due in particular to the advent of the Internet of Things, the worldwide stock of data is continuously growing, and along with it the range and scale of available data.

And data are the food eaten by artificial intelligence (AI), among other new applications. But how to get the supply and demand for data to meet up securely and within the law? By meeting in a secure, reliable marketplace for trading in data – the Telekom Data Intelligence Hub.

The Data Intelligence Hub (or DIH) acts as an interface, that has been missing in the field of data management till now. It offers a centralized platform and a holistic overview of the data available for free or for sale on the market. At the same time, it also offers a variety of analytical tools to enable you to process data using such methods as “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence”, for example. In this way, enterprises can optimize their own internal processes with the help of data freely available on the market. This can help them avoid production hold-ups and unnecessary costs due to wait times and wasteful warehousing of stock, for example.

An example from the logistics sector

Worldwide, about one third of all deliveries arrive later than originally planned. Foodstuffs, for example, often reach their destination spoiled. When tracking a delivery, it is known where the shipment was loaded and more or less where it should be at the moment.

What is unknown is whether, when, why and precisely where a delivery becomes delayed. Such data are missing from the process chain. But it is precisely this sort of information that would allow one to take countermeasures in real time. Only in this way can businesses reduce wait times and storage costs, and make reliable plans. And these data are in fact available, but spread over a number of locations. And the DIH can be used to obtain data, to analyze them and to merge them into one’s own data in a consistent manner.

An example from the smart city

Even before the official launch of its Data Intelligence Hub, Deutsche Telekom had already won over the city of Bonn as its first partner. The city authorities checked out the DIH as a new data platform, and will in future offer the city’s freely available data sets via the system. The DIH’s role here is as a “citizen’s information portal”. It provides Bonn residents access to data about the city. It will provide such information as sight-seeing opportunities, the location of Wi-Fi whotspots and taxi stands and waste collection times. Lots of cities already collect a wide variety of data. They deploy traffic and environmental sensors to provide information on the traffic situation in the city center and to collect data on air and water quality. Other possible applications include smart parking, smart street lighting and optimized waste collection. Smart city planners will in future be in a position to combine data from a variety of freely available data sources (open data) and use them in combination to make specific predictions.

As a wcloud-based solution, the DIH is available round the clock and independently of user device and operating system. The Data Intelligence Hub’s top priority is security and trust: all data transfers are conducted using encryption and involving only the two selected partners – between a business and its supplier, for example.

There is no need to save data externally or at a central location. Deutsche Telekom takes on the role of neutral custodian to ensure data sovereignty, meaning that the business supplying the data retains control at all times, and can effectively choose who receives what information.

An international initiative for secure data exchange

The DIH emerged through close coordination with the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), an organization of which Deutsche Telekom is a member. Under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (known as the Fraunhofer ISST), it is planned to create virtual data rooms in which data can be exchanged securely across international borders.

Deutsche Telekom is the first business to have used the IDSA's secure reference architecture for its Data Intelligence Hub. “The IDSA initiative champions the idea of data sovereignty, that is to say the ability to determine the rules that govern the use of one's own data and even to provide the data themselves – an essential prerequisite for data marketplaces to work,” says Boris Otto, head of the Fraunhofer ISST and project manager for the institute’s research project. “I see Deutsche Telekom as taking on a leading role on the market with its Data Intelligence Hub initiative, as it has the capacity to offer reliable and sovereign data exchange services to the actors in the market. That ability gives it a competitive advantage.”

The Data Intelligence Hub was developed using technology of partners as Cloudera and was implemented by Ultra Tendency. As a data marketplace, it makes its living from the wide variety of companies that participate in it. Aside from publicly available data (open data), IBM, for example, also provides weather data from weather.com and Motionlogic provides in-depth analysis of traffic and movement flows. KPMG, Detecon and T-Systems Multimedia Solutions advise customers from a wide variety of sectors, including the public, healthcare and finance sectors as well as the transport, logistics and automotive industries on the implementation of their projects using the DIH.