BERLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The IOTA Foundation, a non-profit organization delivering the world's first scalable, feeless and decentralized distributed ledger technology, announced today its technology will be used as a key enabler for Project Alvarium, an open source effort being formed under the Linux Foundation. The Alvarium project will be focused on building out the concept of a Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) to establish the provenance of data coming from multiple different sources and deliver data to applications with measurable confidence. As announced today in a press release from Linux Foundation, the project will be seeded by code from Dell Technologies and has support from other industry leaders including (for a complete list, please refer to the Linux Foundation press release).
As the amount of data available continues to surge, trust in data is on the decline. Increasing government regulations around data usage and privacy have created a fundamental shift in how data is viewed and used. Trust in data has decreased as transparency on its origin, collection process and storage has also decreased.
Currently, data used for decision making across a number of industries comes from multiple repositories containing information that exists in multiple formats, with very little information on its accuracy, provenance or timelessness. This can often lead to inaccuracies in reporting and can have critical implications in areas such as artificial intelligence, where “training data” is used to develop new machine-learning models. Another example of the importance of trusted data is in the pharmaceutical industry where companies use existing data from clinical trials to inform the development of new patient medications. If this data is inaccurate or outdated it could greatly impact the end results.
“Trust in data is increasingly important in today’s organizational environments. Project Alvarium is coming at an integral time as the intersection of control over data, transparency and privacy touch just about every single organization and person. IOTA’s inherent trust layer was developed specifically to address these challenges, and we look forward to the technology being a core enabler in Data Confidence Fabric,” said David Sønstebø, Co-founder, IOTA Foundation.
With this newly introduced Data Confidence Fabric, also known as a “trust fabric,” trust is inserted into the data path through a combination of technologies. As data flows through a given DCF, a data confidence score is generated and as different trust fabrics intersect, data is enabled to pass confidently through networks spanning public and private boundaries. Metadata on the data’s provenance, a confidence score indicating the overall trustworthiness, in addition to the policies set by the data owner on which aspects are available for sharing or monetization, all will accompany the data. The concept introduces an entirely new way for Data Scientists and Analysts to interact with data across multiple industries. In addition, it puts the control of the data back in the hands of the owner by allowing them to choose how and what is shared, and who has access.
“Data Confidence Fabrics address three inherent and often conflicting challenges within the massive debate over data-- how to keep control in the hands of the owner, how to allow for its public use and which data to trust,” said Dominik Schiener, co-founder, IOTA Foundation. “I am confident we will see widespread adoption of this technology which will change the way we consume, trust and use data in the future.”
“Project Alvarium will completely redefine the way we view data and transparency, as well as improve the way every single industry handles privacy,” said Jason Shepherd, Edge and IoT CTO, Dell Technologies. “By creating the industry’s first method to deliver data with measurable confidence, we will fundamentally change how individuals, businesses, non-profit organizations and government entities alike manage, share and monetize their data efficiently at scale, all while maintaining privacy based on terms they establish.”
IOTA provides distributed ledger technology that moves beyond blockchain by solving its inherent limitations of scalability, transaction fees, energy consumption, and centralization. IOTA’s unique Tangle technology creates an immutable audit trail for data by tracking the origin of the data and defining access privileges for different user groups. This creates a trust layer for data that can be used across multiple industries and in machine-to-machine communication which is the basis for the Internet of Things (IoT), and more specifically artificial intelligence (AI).
Project Alvarium will foster a community to collaborate on the baseline open-source framework and related APIs that bind together the various ingredients that constitute trust fabrics, as well as define the algorithms that drive confidence scores as data flows through any given implementation.
For a live demo of the DCF, visit the Dell Technologies kiosk within the LF Edge stand (A141) at IoT Solutions World Congress, October 29-31 in Barcelona.
For a video about the collaboration, please watch here.
ABOUT IOTA FOUNDATION
A global non-profit foundation incorporated and headquartered in Germany, the IOTA Foundation's mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies (DLT), including the IOTA Tangle. The Foundation encourages education about and adoption of distributed ledger technologies through the creation of ecosystems and the standardization of these new protocols.
The IOTA Tangle moves beyond blockchain by providing the world's first scalable, feeless and decentralized distributed ledger technology. The Tangle uses its own unique technology to solve three fundamental problems with blockchain technology: high fees, scaling, and centralization. It is an open-source protocol connecting the human economy with the machine economy by facilitating novel Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions, including secure data transfer, fee-less micropayments, and secure access control for devices.
Visit www.iota.org for more information. Follow IOTA on Twitter: @iotatoken and YouTube: IOTA Foundation.