Data-as-a-Service: A Cloud-Based Federated Platform to Facilitate Discovery of Private Sector Datasets

Frequently described as the oil of the digital economy, data is today fervently sought after and its innovative use demonstrated in increasingly wide-ranging applications. To use data however, data users would first have to find them. In the realm of public / open data, there are often governmental and non-governmental agencies that consolidate and provide such data to users via centralized web portals. However, the equivalent is not available for datasets from the private sector, where data providers currently operate in highly-siloed environments. Data users seeking data but unfamiliar with the industry sector of interest have no straightforward mechanism to do so. This paper proposes Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) - a cloud-based, federated (peer-to-peer-like) dataset discovery platform based on open-source software, which allows for private sector data providers to increase visibility of their datasets to be discovered by unfamiliar data users. We explain the considerations behind the proposed dataset discovery platform and demonstrate it in a real-life pilot implementation.