Page 117 - ITU Journal - ICT Discoveries - Volume 1, No. 2, December 2018 - Second special issue on Data for Good

ITU JOURNAL: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 1(2), December 2018

ready to offer the necessary environments. There dominance by using exclusiveness of information
are multiple initiatives and projects that have and data collection in a data-driven economy.
collected valuable experiences, however, most of Besides the regulation measures suggested in [16],
them are of an ad-hoc nature and involved a limited necessary data market and data exchange
number of stakeholders and they are not based on mechanisms need to be created to allow data
sufficient conceptual research, which in its own exchange at all stages of the data value chain from
turn would require a significantly wider experience data production to data analysis and business
and observational basis. application.

2.2 Data-driven economy and technology Few European projects address general issues of
integration data protection, policies, and exchange. However,
there is no common vision and widely accepted
As described in recent studies and reports there are approach to create open data markets that would
clear trends of all technologies’ digitalization and an benefit big and small companies. European Union
increased demand of advanced/smart data (EU) and Member States, anticipating the DSM
handling to enable the full potential of data-driven paradigm, invested significant resources in building
technologies. This is characterized by wide an advanced digital infrastructure and regulatory
technology integration based on modern big data basis for a digital economy in Europe. A recent
infrastructures and technologies which are development of digital and data services is
predominantly cloud based. primarily based on individual companies’ genius
that discover and explore unique business
Data processing and data analytics require opportunities. However, despite bright examples
continuous data storage and exchange between such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other
applications and processes, which need to be social network and social media platforms that
supported by a scalable distributed data storage actually demonstrated the potential of data-driven
infrastructure, such as using a Hadoop Distributed and digital technologies, the full potential of the
File System (HDFS) [13], Data Lake Storage [14], data-driven economy has not been realized yet.
and facilitated by a special functional component Recent technology development is characterized by
such as data exchange, which can be a part of the conceptual research lagging behind occasionally
data market [12] in a general business scenario. generated business opportunities.

Currently, there is no common approach and Further development of data-driven technologies
architectural model to address potential must combine conceptual research and
cross-industry, cross-application and cross- development and implementation of economy-wide
platform integration and exchange of data and data- technological platforms for data collection, storage,
driven applications. Most current developments exchange and integration with industry, business
and use of data in data analytics and data-driven and social applications.
applications require and remain inside vertical data
processing stacks (typically belonging to one 3. CHALLENGES IN DATA MARKETS
company). The best examples of effective data use ADOPTION
for business purposes and offering data analytics
platforms for business as services are provided by Based on the analysis provided above, we can define
big data infrastructure and cloud providers such as the general gap that creates a number of challenges
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, for future data economy development and data
Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Facebook. All these market adoption: Data is becoming an economic
companies combine three key components of the good but there is no facility to unleash its full
modern hub/networked digital economy [15]: (1) market potential.
(big data) computation and storage infrastructure
together with business (data analytics) services, (2) We can list some of the identified challenges that
direct business services and marketplace, (3) motivated current research by the authors while
wide/extended customer base and/or access actively developing the modern data infrastructure
created around products or services. In recent for data-driven research and industry:
research [16], these types of companies are defined
as “superstars” that achieve their market

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