Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AEGIS (Advanced Big Data Value Chain for Public Safety and Personal Security)

Teaser

Public Safety and Personal Security (hereinafter PSPS) refers to the welfare and protection of the general public and of individuals through prevention and protection from dangers affecting safety such as crimes, accidents or disasters. It is usually expressed as a...

Summary

Public Safety and Personal Security (hereinafter PSPS) refers to the welfare and protection of the general public and of individuals through prevention and protection from dangers affecting safety such as crimes, accidents or disasters. It is usually expressed as a governmental responsibility, but public safety division also other organisations (and volunteers) and not only police, emergency medical services, fire force, etc. In a broad sense PSPS refers to both public health and public security issues, hence is in itself a multi-domain sector that includes, among others, safety from criminal acts, safety from accidents, food safety, homeland security, emergency response, natural disaster management and environmental safety.
Currently there are lots of PSPS applications that are based on fragmented and domain-specific data and this hinders the potential of the PSPS service sector, since a slew of data sources (from other domains) could further enhance and add value in such baseline services, if properly processed and combined. However, the overall potential of efficiently analysing even a small portion of the available data is immense. Risk-based crime prediction techniques, including spatiotemporal regression, risk terrain models, and advanced seasonal decomposition and trend prediction methods are applied on such data to transform reaction to crime and other emergencies (i.e. fire) to proactive management.
AEGIS is attempting to unify the fragmented and domain-specific data that is hindering the PSPS service sector from improving both its performance and efficiency. To this end, AEGIS is addressing this problem using the dual technologies of Linked Data and Big Data. Linked Data technologies enable the integration of diverse data sources in a unified data model that is both human- and machine-readable. Big Data technologies enable the storage and analysis of increasingly larger amounts of data at low cost, using commodity hardware.
AEGIS delivers an integrated Big Data analytics platform targeting multiple business sectors and taking into consideration structured, unstructured & multilingual datasets, rejuvenates existing models and facilitates organisations in the Public Safety & Personal Security linked sectors to provide better and personalised services to their users. From the technology perspective, AEGIS targets to revolutionise semantic technologies in big data, big data analytics & visualisations as well as security and privacy frameworks by addressing current challenges & requirements of cross-domain and multilingual applications.
AEGIS offers novel services and applications that allow PSPS-related industries to generate: (a) more factual and evidence-based analytics, (b) improved decision support models, and (c) new business services focused on real-time data collaboration, knowledge sharing and notifications amongst the key stakeholders.
Although open data sources are leveraged toward enhanced PSPS services provision, the AEGIS data ecosystem is based on a trusted multi-level network, enabling proprietary and also private data sharing and seamless integration functionalities in a secure environment under clear terms.

Work performed

The project progressed according its work plan and performed the following work:
• The project set the main ingredients of the data value chain to be served by AEGIS, identified stakeholders, needs, data and defined the AEGIS Data Value Chain Definition and Project Methodology
• Identified the most important data handling activities to be offered by the AEGIS platform
• Defined the AEGIS platform system requirements, user stories and architecture.
• Delivered first a mock-up and then a functioning version of the integrated AEGIS platform
• Updated the design of the platform and its implementation in 3 iterations adter the initial version. This included redesign of the user interface and improvement of the tools integration
• Defined a framework for evaluating the AEGIS data value chain through a set of selected business demonstrators from Automotive, Insurance, Smart Home and Assisted Living domains; implemented the three versions of the demonstrators and evaluated the all versions of the AEGIS platform.
• Maximise the project’s impact via effective dissemination and communication of its findings and results
• Engaged with the community to get valuable feedback to the platform
• Worked on exploitation and business cases development:
o Defined the AEGIS Exploitation strategy as well as the exploitation and sustainability plans;
o provided a market Analysis and positioning for AEGIS focusing on specific technology competitors and leading to the identification of the innovative exploitable assets and business target groups;
o performed the strategic analysis of the AEGIS strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT)
o defined a business model and a business plan oriented to the potential customers
• In collaboration with the members of the Ethics experts Committee defined and applied an ethics evaluation framework for AEGIS

Final results

The main idea behind AEGIS is the development of a Big Data platform, which will facilitate data integration activities and will open up data, under different access mechanism, to all stakeholders of the sectors addressed, as well as to other parties, capitalising on the data interconnection technologies to be integrated into the platform. In this manner, AEGIS will heavily contribute towards simplifying data analytics over 4V datasets, making use of semantic technologies and advanced data handling mechanisms and analytics algorithms in order to break down information silos and breed a data sharing culture amongst enterprises. What’s more is that the availability and constant grow of the available data volume will not only catalyse the implementation part of new services and products, but also the conceptualisation/ideation process; algorithms and analytics recognising and showcasing emerging topics and trends will aid stakeholders come up with new service and application scenarios “on-time”, beating competition. In this context, enterprises and organisations will then enjoy the character of prosumers, and they will gain access to data and analytics difficult to get under their current modus operandi, minimising the necessary time to market for their products and services. Especially tackling the PSPS an insurance sector, the increase in data availability and the offer of novel, cloud based data analytics is expected to accelerate heavily intelligence extraction from multiple data sources, thus letting organisation to offer new services of real-time character, which are not offered at this time as data acquisition, harmonisation and processing constitutes a major time-consuming activity for them.
Strengthening innovation capacity is key to AEGIS, as its success can be only witnessed by the generation of new value in terms of services, businesses and data utilisation, helping the EU data market establish a leading position in the global big data landscape. Innovation pursued through AEGIS is mainly focusing on SMEs, Industry players and the public sector organisation. The project aspires to bring together all stakeholders involved in the value chain of developing a commercially viable platform, and through carefully orchestrated showcases to highlight the soundness and the technological and business potential of the proposed concepts, tools and services.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.aegis-bigdata.eu.