On July 24, 2017, the IoT Observatory based at University of Southampton and the CRACS project based at Oxford e-Research Centre hosted a day long workshop on technical and ethical challenges for IoT data sharing at the Oxford e-Research Centre. The purpose of the workshop was to understand perspectives of PETRAS user-partners, policy, standards and governance stream, privacy and trust stream on technical, ethical and policy challenges for data sharing and re-use in the IoT ecosystems. The workshop participants represented both academic and user-partners and was chaired by Prof. David de Roure, OERC.
The participants had interactive discussions on “why IoT Observatory matters” and how it can integrate the different perspectives on data sharing in its infrastructure. A summary of the key outcomes of workshop include.
- IoT Observatory is a piece of infrastructure that can bring together the research outputs of projects within the PETRAS to describe the philosophical, technical, ethical and legal challenges for IoT data innovation through data sharing and re-use.
- In addition to data, analytics sharing and re-use, a significant contribution of IoT Observatory is to foster innovation by enabling sharing of methods and tools different projects use for analytics and applications on datasets, including software and user-studies.
- It will support user partners for user-centric transparency by enhancing end-users’ awareness about their choice, case by case use of data, and purpose of data sharing to engage more number of users with the service providers.
- Informed decision making and user-awareness are open research problems for which the IoT Observatory makes a good case.