Problem statement

1. Drivers (may) own cars and produce data
2. Data is stored by the entity who created/deployed the device to the car
3. New data driven businesses need to access the data

As of today, there is no unified way of handling consent, and data access across all parties. Everything is handled individually by the parties involved. There are commercial solutions avalable like caruso, but they are working to their closed conditions. Also it seems that data access to the car data is done via the VIN. In the data exchange platform we aim for huge datasets, with unified and open data access. Also the exchange platform shall employ measures to manage consent in huge datasets. This means, if datasets consists data that are missing a valid consent then a publication of this datasets is not possible. Caruso is focussing only of a subset of the members of the ecosystem, it has use cases employed for data providers and consumers. The data producers are left out. In the light of the upcoming legislative changes, this will be a gap.

Last but not least, caruso is a business and hence is looking for profitability. COVESA can work on a standardized way for exchanging data on that platform. The operation is intentionally left out since this is handled by the members of the eco-system. The communication between single instances and data exchange is based on the standards and therefore the exchange is possible. 

Desired state

1. Drivers and owners produce data based on consent
2. Data is stored by the entity who created/deployed the device to the car if consented by the owner
3. This entity defines terms and conditions to access the stored data
4. Interfaces allow the access to data protected by state of the art security measures and access control
5. We create a goto-place where all participants can go and explore
6. Everyone can onboard and register for accessing the data according to the predefined terms and conditions
7. Curated/processed datasets, models, and other things can be made available again

Solution outline

A data exchange platform is a managed environment with:

• a unified access across data sources (OEM, service providers),
• with the ability to search for specific data set
• a well defined SLA and legally compliant,
• a proper separation of safety relevant and regulated data,
• straight access to a number of data points,
• very low data consumption on transport side,
• upload to any data store,

protected by

• access right management, rate limitation and a paywall,
• state of the art security measures,

to increase attractivity, usefulness and visibility to third party developers, experimenting with their business ideas

To enable scale, all must be self-services. No human interaction is required to onboard users, cars, new services.

Two options are possible. Direct data access after onboarding (bypassing the OEM cloud) or indirect access via the OEM cloud. For different use cases, different options might be the best. tbc

For different development phases, not only car data can be utilized but also recorded data in a data lake (served by the playground) or synthetical data provided by a service. Especially for testing/validation purposes this seems very useful.

This is the project space where everything around the data exchange platform will be hosted.

Existing/ongoing activities outside COVESA

Caruso, a german based company offers a data market place. It does focus on the commercial aspect only. The relation between data aggregator, broker to data consumer is only modelled. The data exchange platform will extend this commercial activity with use cases beside this commercial aspects and will add a low entry alternative to this marketplace. More information you can find here.

Another member based organization (https://gavda.org/) is working on this. The activities, visible on their website are irregular and it seems that this actvity is not very activ.