Data is everywhere, but how can it be useful?

Having only received its funding in September 2013, Connected Digital Economy is one of the latest Catapults to come on line and, so far, has just nine projects underway. Underlining Crockett's point about its horizontal nature, most of these early projects are being conducted in conjunction with other Catapults. But the amorphous nature of the 'digital economy' means the sector is difficult to define in its own right. "If you want to do something meaningful, you have got to narrow that down and focus," said Crockett. The initial focus is on the data value chain within the digital economy. This covered how data is collected, the data sets from which it is collected, how it is transported and how data will be transported in the future. Equally, it looks at how data is integrated, visualised and used. Moreover it looks at the techniques and technologies that this value chain uses or needs and the products and services that could be created. But, Crockett admitted, this was still too broad. "We are talking about a very large, global, fast moving, changing sector, so we had to narrow it down further; pick a few areas in which we could make a difference, as opposed to skimming lots of things." Crockett and his team chose four areas within the data value chain. "These are things that industry wasn't going to overcome quickly enough. So we are trying to find and remove obstacles that are stopping lots and lots of people innovating and getting ideas to market." These four areas are summarised as: reducing licensing friction; building diverse data and content sets; personal data, trust and privacy; and building labs and demonstrators. Reducing licensing friction is potentially a huge benefit to design engineers. "The copyright laws, at the moment, are so long winded and difficult that it is stifling creativity," said Crockett. "It means people often 'bootleg' it or give up; either way is not good. But if you made it automated, simpler and quick, you could take the friction out of it and unlock the creativity." A prominent factor in resolving this will be the Copyright Hub. Crockett described the operation. "It has a team working with an organisation representing the rights holders in industry. We are developing, pretty much from scratch, a digital exchange and all the techniques and technologies to create the machine to machine digital exchange and pass through a whole iteration of use cases." Another area that will depend on the electronics industry will come through the labs and demonstrators, as Crockett explained. "Data innovation often takes place without reference to the next generation of connectivity. Data innovators in the UK really need to understand how they can use next generation connectivity to get better performance for their innovation. You need both parts working to maximise things, so we are looking at building demonstrators and labs at our Centre here in London where people can come to experience and work with next generation connectivity." An example is the 5G consortium based a the University of Surrey. The Catapult is involved in providing expertise and looking at how innovators can get involved in 5G platform development. Another example is involvement in the White Space consortium in Milton Keynes, looking at ways of supporting the Internet of Things. "We are also looking at having things here in the centre in London [where the Catapult is based] working on wearables or having a whole library of different wireless and mobile technologies that are coming out in the future. We really want to get the data innovators and creative people fused with what is happening with connectivity and mobile." Further interest for electronics companies in this Catapult's work will be in the area of personal trust and data privacy – not just in terms of having the right interfaces to provide useful data in the first place. Crockett added: "We want to work with the electronics industry on things like sensors and software and on how we can deal with [the data trust] issue. When we are collecting data for diverse data sets, we want to work with and help people on new ways of collecting data." The Connected Digital Economy catapult is different from the other catapults, Crockett concluded. "You have to look at digital in a different way – what are the real challenges with which the market needs help? I think we have found the four goals and we want to hit the back of the net with all four!" Case Study - Integrated Transport and Weather Information Pilot (ITWIP) ITWIP is a collaboration between the Digital Catapult, the Met Office, Sunderland Software City and the Transport Systems Catapult, with close involvement from the Tyne and Wear Transport Authority and Sunderland City Council. It aims to explore the potential of integrating accurate weather information, released for the first time by the Met Office, with other data sources in an urban transport and logistics scenario. Dr Maurizio Pilu, partnerships director at the Connected Digital Economy Catapult, said: "Bringing these centres of excellence together, along Met Office data that has not been available before, makes this a nationally important project and it is an opportunity for software SMEs in the North East to enter new markets and to sell innovative solutions demanded be international organisations." And it is not just software companies that stand to benefit. Crockett added: "A company in Sunderland that makes electric motors [for vehicles] realised that, if it had nearly real time feeds on weather data, it could improve the performance of predicting battery life in their engines." The reason? Electric vehicles use more power in wet weather. Another example is the use of existing data sets to develop technologies to deal with, or at least provide efficient warning of, extreme weather events, particularly flooding.