ABSTRACT

Sharing of data sets can provide tremendous mutual benefits for industry, researchers and nonprofit organizations. For example, companies can profit from the fact that university researchers explore their data sets and make discoveries, which help the company to improve their business. At the same time, researchers are always on the search for real world data sets to show that their newly developed techniques work in practice. Unfortunately, many attempts to share relevant data sets between different stakeholders in industry and academia fail or require a large investment to make data sharing possible. A major obstacle is that data often comes with prohibitive restrictions on how it can be used (requiring e.g., the enforcement of legal terms or other policies, handling data privacy issues, etc.). In order to enforce these requirements today, lawyers are usually involved in negotiation the terms of each contract. It is not atypical that this process of creating an individual contract for data sharing ends up in protracted negotiations, which are both disconnected from what the actual stakeholders aim to do and fraught as both sides struggle with the implications and possibilities of modern security, privacy, and data sharing techniques. Worse, fear of missing a loophole in how the data might be (mis)used often prevents many data sharing efforts from even getting off the ground. To address these challenges, our new data sharing spoke will enable data providers to easily share data while enforcing constraints on the use of the data. This effort has two key components:(1) Creating a licensing model for data that facilitates sharing data that is not necessarily open or free between different organizations and (2) Developing a prototype data sharing software platform, ShareDB, which enforces the terms and restrictions of the developed licenses. We believe these efforts will have a transformative impact on how data sharing takes place. By moving data out of the silos of individuals and single organizations and into the hands of broader society, we can tackle many societally significant problems.

This new data sharing spoke will enable data providers to easily share data while enforcing constraints on the use of the data. Many services and platforms that provide access to data sets exist already today. However, these platforms generally promote completely open access and do not address the aforementioned issues that arise when dealing with proprietary data. Thus, the effort has three key components: (1) Creating a licensing model for data that facilitates sharing data that is not necessarily open or free between different organizations and (2) developing a prototype data sharing software platform, ShareDB, which enforces the terms and restrictions of the developed licenses, and (3) developing and integrating relevant metadata that will accompany the datasets shared under the different licenses, making them easily searchable and interpretable. To ensure that the developed tools and licenses are useful, the project will form the Northeast Data Sharing Group, comprising of many different stakeholders to make the licensing model widely accepted and usable in many application domains (e.g., health and finance). The intellectual merit of this proposal is to design a licensing model and a data sharing platform that is widely accepted and usable as a template in many different domains. While there exist other efforts to enable data sharing (e.g., Creative Commons), they focus on the case where the data owner is willing to openly share the data on the Internet. This licensing model and the ecosystem is different since it allows data owners to enforce certain requirements stated in a data sharing agreement (e.g., on who is allowed to access the data) and also provides tools to make data sharing of sensitive information safe. The licenses and software we propose to investigate will make it easier for organizations to open up their data to the appropriate organizations, while maintaining the ability to ensure it is protected, that access is revocable, and that access controls and audit logs are maintained.

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