An investigation into information reuse for cost prediction - from needs to a data reuse framework

Abstract

The need to be able to reuse a wide variety of data that an organise has created, constitutes a part of the challenge known as ‘Broad Data’. The aim of this research was to create a framework that would enable the reuse of broad data while complying with the corporate requirements of data security and privacy.

A key requirement in enabling reuse of broad data is to ensure maximum interoperability among datasets, which in Linked Data depends on the URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) that the datasets have in common (i.e. reused). The URIs in linked data can be dereferenced to obtain more information about it from its owner and hence dereferencing can have a profound impact on making someone reuse a URI. However, the wide variety of vocabulary in broad data means the provenance and ownership of URIs could be key in promoting its reuse by the data creators. The full potential offered by linked data cannot be realised due to the fundamental way the URIs are currently constructed. In part, this is because the World Wide Web (Web) was designed for an open web of documents, not a secure web of data.

By making subtle but essential changes to the building blocks one can change the way data is handled on the Web, thereby creating what has been proposed in this thesis as the World Wide Information web (WWI). The WWI is based on a framework of people and things that are active contributors to the web of data (hereinafter referred to as ‘active thing’), identified by URIs. The URI for an active thing is constructed from its path in the organisational stakeholder hierarchy to represent the provenance of ownership. As a result, it becomes easier to reference data held in sparse and heterogeneous resources, to navigate complex organisational structures, and to automatically include the provenance of the data to support trust based data reuse and an organic growth of linked data. As a result, the new data retrieval technique referred to as ‘domino request’ was demonstrated, where sparsely located linked data can be reused as though it was from a single source. With the use of a domino request on WWI web there is no more need to include the name of the organisation itself to maintain a catalogue of all the data sources to be queried and thus, making the ‘security by privacy’ on the Web a reality. At the same time, WWI allows the data owner or its stakeholder to maintain their privacy not only on the source of data, but also on the provenance of individual URIs that describe the data.

The thesis concludes that WWI is a suitable framework for broad data reuse and in addition demonstrates its application in managing data in the air travel industry, where security by privacy could play a significant role in controlling the flow of data among its ‘internet of things’ that have multiple stakeholders.

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