Organizations that are rapidly decomposing their business models into core data structures hold a significant competitive advantage over their peers.

As a matter of fact, research suggests that insight-driven businesses are growing at an average of 30% each year; by 2021, they are predicted to take $1.8 trillion annually from their less-informed industry competitors (Forrester).

While their corporate structure might remain the same, their business processes will naturally evolve to a purely digital state. In this setting, data acts as the life force that circulates through the organization’s most complex business logic and operational systems.

The current offerings on the market are scattered and insufficient to meet the needs of insights-driven organizations. To remain ahead of the curve, businesses will need to come up with novel ways to govern, collect, process and share data.

Because insights-driven organizations need adaptive data strategies, we built Nevermined.

After spending years building big data estates for organizations large and small around the globe, Nevermined’s co-founders, Aitor Argomaniz, Dimitri De Jonghe and Donald Gossen, decided to turn their expertise into a product. A product that would support any data strategy for insight-driven businesses and incentivize collaboration in hyper competitive environments.

Nevermined is a Data Ecosystem platform that leverages Web3.0 technology, Federated Learning frameworks and privacy preserving techniques to create the right blend of capabilities and incentives for participants to share data and contribute resources back to the ecosystem. Nevermined is the enabler of a new era in which collaboration becomes the de-facto standard in the most competitive industries.

Nevermined is built with and for insights-driven organizations. The ecosystem offers an all-in-one solution for Regulatory Compliance (i.e. GDPR and CCPA), Data Science, Data Sharing and Data Trading. As the data structures described previously engage in transactional relationships with other legal and technological entities, they require the appropriate tools to do so in a safe and compliant way.

Without having to entirely redesign an organization’s IT architecture, Nevermined makes it possible to actively use and passively track and record where data is coming from, how data is being collected, and who is using it, both inside and outside of an organization.

Because Nevermined leverages a unique data provenance protocol and offers an architecture-agnostic framework, any entity connecting to the ecosystem is gifted with the ability to consume and process data or any other digital asset (algorithms, computation, etc.) available inside or outside of their premises, without actually moving the underlying data assets.

The ecosystem consists of three main components:

Data Sharing — Share data between unknown/untrusted parties while always maintaining control

• Data Publishing — Easily connect your existing data catalog to the ecosystem and choose which assets to make available to whom and/or under which conditions. Allow for dynamic, static and on-demand pricing.
• Data Discovery — Browse through your organization’s own digital assets and datasets, as well as those of third parties. Query the ecosystem with our intuitive Discovery features.
• Data Access — Seamlessly request access to datasets inside and outside your organization. Perform analysis remotely via Nevermined’s built in Federated Learning and Data In Situ Compute analytics capabilities.
• Decentralized In-Situ Compute (DISC) — Run remote computation jobs across your organization’s data or remotely within third party premises. Access new levels of insights by securely mining across complementary datasets.
• Federated Learning — With its agnostic capabilities, Nevermined lets you pick the appropriate Federated Learning frameworks to work across multiple datasets at the same time. Extract value and insights where you couldn’t before.

Data Monetization — Leverage your data and assets to create real value

• Data Tokenization — Attach value to any digital asset, business process, or analytic computation. Leverage secure and cutting-edge smart contract logic to create new revenue streams for your organization.
• Data Marketplace — Supply data to and consume data from your marketplace by transacting with other data providers and consumers inside and outside your organization. Turn your IT Cost Center into a Profit Center.
• Rewards — Get compensated by ecosystem participants when taking actions to drive network growth. Accrue value for activities that align your objectives and goals with the ecosystem.

Data Governance — Build and manage regulatory compliant data strategies with built-in privacy

• Regulatory Compliance — Embrace high fidelity data lineage and enhanced data governance processes thanks to decentralized access control mechanisms. Keep your data safe and compliant and mitigate the challenges of GDPR and CCPA.
• Data Privacy — Whether you adopt an offensive or a defensive data strategy, data works with you and not against you. Nevermined provides best-in class privacy preserving data sharing techniques.
• Data Catalog — Record and share the metadata about your data so that your assets can be discovered and utilized. Nevermined integrates with your existing data catalog solution to bring your data governance capabilities to the next level.
• Incentives — Bounty your most complex engineering issues within the ecosystem. Incentivize others to share and publish data to increase the accuracy of your insights.

Not only is Nevermined an improvement over existing data governance solutions, but it opens up new opportunities for data scientists eager to embrace the power of Federated Learning at scale.

Whether you’re looking to increase the accuracy of your model, buy or sell a dataset, or rent out the output of your model to third parties, Nevermined gives you the right set up to do so. Thanks to its tokenization capabilities, organizations now have the ability to co-own digital assets and their distribution in untrusted environments.

Among other capabilities, the Ecosystem lets you:

• Cut your administrative costs with decentralized access control.
• Increase regulatory compliance with high fidelity data provenance to exceed the demands of GDPR, CCPA, etc.
• Improve your analytics modelling and AI applications with privacy preserving Federated Learning for businesses.
• Buy and sell data while keeping it secure with remote computation through Nevermined’s Decentralized In-Situ Computation solution.
• Freely create your own marketplace with your digital assets by plugging into your existing data catalogs.
• Crowdsource intelligence from other data-driven businesses by putting up bounties on your most challenging engineering issues.

Because Nevermined puts users at the center of the development process, the team is always looking for collaborators and design partners to build an ecosystem enabler that best meets users’ and organization’s needs. Interested in becoming a partner? Drop us a line!

If you would like to try out the Ecosystem, feel free to join our GitHub to start exploring the different components we offer. For a more technical overview of the solution, this article will cover the basics.

We’re on our way to building more open, efficient, and resilient data structures for insights-driven organizations. Seize the opportunity and come join us on this journey.

Originally posted on 2020-11-18 on Medium.