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Updates from the OwnYourData team.
Updates from the OwnYourData team.
The vast amount of data being produced everyday requires semantics to provide meanings to the data. The recent advances of Semantic Web technologies provides us with standard data formats (i.e., Resource Description Framework – RDF), vocabularies (e.g., PROV-O for provenance) and tools (e.g., SPARQL for querying data) to add semantics to data and structuring the metadata. This use of semantics would in turn allows advances data analysis and processing to the data and its metadata.
The MyPCH project aims to develop methods and tools to allow diabetes patients to share their data using Semantic Container. As part of the process, we provide a mean to transform the raw JSON data of diabetes patients’ observation data into RDF. The transformation is conducted in two steps: (i) Ontology definition, and (ii) Raw data transformation
We define a MyPCH ontology for the patient’s observation data based on the HL7-FHIR ontology for patient observation. The ontology is designed to maintain a high-degree of compliance with the original FHIR model while reducing the needs for data duplications required in the original FHIR-RDF model. An excerpt of the adapted ontology is shown in the figure below.
Figure: the FHIR-based ontology for the MyPCH project (click to enlarge)
As the next step, we utilize the RML mapping and CaRML engine to transform the raw JSON data into its RDF. The current version of RML mapping is available in Semantic Container. The resulted RDF representation of patients’ data would allow further analysis of the data using SPARQL queries (see also the tutorial for using these technologies in the semcon/sc-sparql container and the following dataflow with concrete diabetes examples). Furthermore, it would allow inferring additional knowledge based on the underlying knowledge with logical reasoning as well as integration of additional background knowledge (e.g., information about devices used for diabetes monitoring) and external knowledge, e.g., WikiData and DBPedia.
Semantic Containers utilizes RDF-based vocabularies to represent its metadata. It adopts the standard Provenance Ontology (W3C PROV-O) to represent its provenance information and SPECIAL vocabularies to represent user consent, in addition to a custom RDF vocabularies to represent container’s metadata. We have extended the user consent vocabularies (SPECIAL vocabularies) with a set of additional classes specific for Semantic Container use cases using a specific namespace scp: <http://w3id.org/semcon/ns/policy#>
. We utilize the vocabulary to automatically check the compliance between user consent of their data and the possible usage of the data by a data processor.
In the MyPCH project, we extend it further with three additional classes for diabetes patients’ data. The classes are assigned as specific types of SPECIAL health data category (svd:Health
). These classes are for now scp:Diabetes
(i.e., the generic diabetes patients’ data), scp: DiabetesSensor
(i.e., insulin data observation from sensors), and scp:InsulinPump
(i.e., insulin data observation provided by insulin pumps).
Personium and OwnYourData are proud to announce a partnership for collaborating in Personal Data Store interoperability.
During the MyData 2019 conference (September 2019) in Helsinki, several PDS (Personal Data Store) innovators had come together and discussed openly regarding the interoperability between different PDSs. After the conference, Christoph Fabianek (OwnYourData) and Salman Farmanfarmaian (Freezr) contributed a first draft of the implementation document: CEPS – Common Endpoint for Personal data Stores.
The goal of the initiative is to allow users of different PDSs (right now: Freezr, Personium, Datafund, Data Vault) to use the same app (i.e., data processing capabilities) and switch between data stores. In a first step a simple app (Tally Zoo: maintain a tally chart for frequent tasks and collect your everyday data) was implemented that can connect natively to the individual PDSs. Subsequently, common interfaces for authorization and common operations like read/write should be harmonized across participating organizations to decouple data store development and app development.
Feel free to contact Dixon or Christoph if you have any questions or want to join the effort. We expect to showcase results in the upcoming MyData 2020 events.
A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in data and is also sometimes referred to as “the practice of imperceptibly altering a work to embed a message about that work”. For Semantic Container a digital watermark is a unique digital fingerprint that is applied to data provided by a Semantic Container, i.e., any data request results in a dataset with insignificant errors that uniquely identifies the recipient of the data set. In case such a dataset is leaked and appears in an unintended location, the person who originally requested and leaked the dataset can be identified. This blog post describes the design of the digital watermarking that will be implemented in the course of the currently ongoing MyPCH project.
To embed a watermark into a dataset the following two steps are performed:
To detect a watermark in a suspicious dataset the following two steps are performed and require the original data to be available:
The above process including various test cases for attacks will be implemented in the next weeks and will soon be available in the Semantic Container base package. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or comments!
Semantic Containers for Data Mobility has reached all project goals by June 2019 and is now finalized with the final report. The three prototypes have developed well and Semantic Containers will continue to be used as infrastructure, especially at ZAMG.
As in the previous posts we summarize here our accomplished goals for this last milestone:
Dates, dates, appointments!
In summary, we can look back on 9 successful project months. SemCon was presented around 10 times at events, we had about 60 internal project meetings, we were able to meet our milestones in time and there are 3 prototypes that show how the exchange with data can work simply and safely: by packaging data with usage rights and provenance information together with the necessary processing logic to enable reliable and easy management.
The project is progressing rapidly and after 6 months, there is now a lot to report in the spring. With Peb Ruswono Aryan, a new team member of the Vienna University of Technology joined us and his areas of specialization are geoinformation systems and Python.
But we also want to share our completed milestones, give an outlook on a few events events, and summarize other activities:
Dates, Dates Dates … We are glad, if you come over!
We wish our readers happy Easter holidays – and we are looking forward to share with you the final Semantic Container project updates at end of June.
With Semantic Containers, the 7-member project team has set itself the goal of developing a prototype for the simple trading of data. Using a few use cases the “proof of concept” will be demonstrated. Three colleagues from the Own Your Data association and four contributors from the Vienna University of Technology team have come together to achieve this goal.
In the ambitious time frame of a total of 9 months project duration (bmvit / FFG call ICT of the Future: Exloring the data market 2018), already at the end of the first third we are happy to announce first successes:
In the past 3 months we have already been diligent. Amongst others, we presented the Semantic Containers at two major events, the Data Market Ignite Night on October 2nd at the Tribe Space and the ICT 2018: Imagine Digital – Connect Europe at the Austria Center on December 5th. Of course, we have seen each other much more often. So often that we alone and up to this point had 22 internal project meetings!
We are confident that it will continue similarly fast with the next two-thirds. The coming third (until March 2019) is dedicated to the programming work, so that we can fully dedicate our time to use cases in the last three months (until June 2019) as planned. Again, there is a happy message: Even the data selection has already taken place, so we could not only reach all our interim goals, but are our own schedule already one step ahead.
In this sense, we will enjoy the upcoming holiday season and wish our readers a peaceful Christmas! See you here again in the New Year when we have new Semantic Container updates available for all data-loving people.