PROV4ITDaTa: Transparent and Direct Transfer of Personal Data to Personal Stores

Gertjan De Mulder, Ben De Meester , Pieter Heyvaert , Ruben Taelman , Ruben Verborgh , Anastasia Dimou
In Proceedings of The Web Conference (2021)

Data is scattered across service providers, heterogeneously structured in various formats. By lack of interoperability, data portability is hindered, and thus user control is inhibited. An interoperable data portability solution for transferring personal data is needed. We demo PROV4ITDaTa: a Web application, that allows users to transfer personal data into an interoperable format to their personal data store. PROV4ITDaTa leverages the open-source solutions RML.io, Comunica, and Solid: (i) the RML.io toolset to describe how to access data from service providers and generate interoperable datasets; (ii) Comunica to query these and more flexibly generate enriched datasets; and (iii) Solid Pods to store the generated data as Linked Data in personal data stores. As opposed to other (hard-coded) solutions, PROV4ITDaTa is fully transparent, where each component of the pipeline is fully configurable and automatically generates detailed provenance trails. Furthermore, transforming the personal data into RDF allows for an interopable solution. By maximizing the use of open-source tools and open standards, PROV4ITDaTa facilitates the shift towards a data ecosystem wherein users have control of their data, and providers can focus on their service instead of trying to adhere to interoperability requirements.

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BibTeX +

@InProceedings{DeMulder2021PROV4ITDaTaTransparentDirect,
    author    = {De Mulder, Gertjan and De Meester, Ben and Heyvaert, Pieter and Taelman, Ruben and Verborgh, Ruben and Dimou, Anastasia},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of The Web Conference},
    title     = {{PROV4ITDaTa: Transparent and Direct Transfer of Personal Data to Personal Stores}},
    year      = {2021},
    pdf       = {https://pieterheyvaert.com/publications/DeMulder2021PROV4ITDaTaTransparentDirect/paper.pdf},
    abstract  = {Data is scattered across service providers, heterogeneously structured in various formats. By lack of interoperability, data portability is hindered, and thus user control is inhibited. An interoperable data portability solution for transferring personal data is needed. We demo PROV4ITDaTa: a Web application, that allows users to transfer personal data into an interoperable format to their personal data store. PROV4ITDaTa leverages the open-source solutions RML.io, Comunica, and Solid: (i) the RML.io toolset to describe how to access data from service providers and generate interoperable datasets; (ii) Comunica to query these and more flexibly generate enriched datasets; and (iii) Solid Pods to store the generated data as Linked Data in personal data stores. As opposed to other (hard-coded) solutions, PROV4ITDaTa is fully transparent, where each component of the pipeline is fully configurable and automatically generates detailed provenance trails. Furthermore, transforming the personal data into RDF allows for an interopable solution. By maximizing the use of open-source tools and open standards, PROV4ITDaTa facilitates the shift towards a data ecosystem wherein users have control of their data, and providers can focus on their service instead of trying to adhere to interoperability requirements.},
}