This abstract was submitted to and presented at CCRC International Conference 2022.

Architecting an Equitable Data Network for theDigital Economy of the New Cyber Civilization: ANew Layer to Meet NeedKim Chandler McDonald and Michael McDonald, FlatWorld Integration Pty Ltd., Australia

The hypothesis this paper supports is that a significantly new technical architecture and approachis critical to addressing the current and emergent needs of, and opportunities within, an equitabledata network for the digital economy of the new Cyber Civilization.

DEMOCRATIZING DATAThe need to level the playing field for data ownership
While the Web was designed to be decentralized it is currently highly centralized around a few
major consumer platforms that rely on ‘surveillance capitalism’ - a term coined in 2019 byProfessor Shoshana Zuboff. As their primary business model there is an implicit and explicit
assumption that the organization owns all data – including customer data and interactions.
In her in masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at theNew Frontier of Power, Professor Zuboff notes, “surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue
lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill
online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, andthwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices…”
Crucially, without a rethinking of how we architect and approach this new frontier of data/digitalassets, we are going to move to increasingly feudal fiefdoms of hoarded data propagated byprostrated peons.
With this rethinking in mind, we envisage a safe, fully-functioning digital economy thatempowers the approaching Cyber Civilization.
This presentation will explore the imperatives for such a shift, what is entailed in the new
approach and how it can empower stakeholders with the tools and the infrastructure that: a)enables them to participate in the data/digital economy; and b) enforces their data rights
automatically, on their behalf, so they can participate without the need to have high-level digitalskills or the power of a large multi-national.
An inclusive digital “language” and tools that works for all levels of society

The internet was initially designed by the overarching organizations of the military and scientificcommunities. It was an invented reality of the digital universe, focused on abstraction andstandardization as its core pillars, with only a small, highly educated and skilled set ofparticipants.
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Conversely, its “successor” - the World Wide Web - enabled society at large to participate in thedigital realm, both personally and professionally. However, within the web there are few, if any
overarching standards that are universally accepted, let alone implemented and adhered to.
Expectations of this happening in any meaningful way are, at best, impractical. One need onlylook at the metric vs imperial units debate, the confusion around data formatting (dd:mm:year or
mm:dd:yr - depends entirely on where you are at the time) or ‘the beautiful game’ of football unless you live in North America, wherein, instead you play soccer - as exemplars of the realityof this challenge.

MOVING FROM CHAOS TO COLLABORATION
Within the digital economy of the new Cyber Civilization a solution must be found that can deal
with ‘chaos’ at scale, for the myriad of different societal and skill levels within it. To do this will
require us to accept that, with all the best efforts and will in the world, standardization does notwork well in ‘cyber-world’ other than for basic communication such as TCP/IP and HTTP. Thatsaid we still need to interact.
Following on from the basic communication premise above, we can draw a parallel to the humanmethod of verbal communication - i.e. we can all, in the main, use our voice boxes to transmit
sounds and our ears to listen to the vibrations make by said sounds – it is, if you will, the ‘agreed
upon’ system we use to speak to each other. That said, there are more than 7000 different
languages in the world so tools of translation are often required to enable us to understand one
another. This is no different in the digital world.
In this digital arena every combination of company, application and user has their own
preferred/specific set of ontologies that they, naturally, want to use to communicate. In humanspeech this is parallel to each of us having our own languages, dialects and jargon. If we are able
to speak each other’s languages it makes communicating and collaborating much simpler - if wecan’t, communication can be difficult if not impossible and the impetus to collaborate drasticallydiminishes. The impediments to collaboration do not stop with a lack of understanding, they also
include lack of trust.
The imperative of trust
Successful trade (be it at a local, national or international level) is underpinned by contracturallaw, which gives parties the trust and confidence that there is a framework to execute an
impartial trade where their rights of ownership and conditions of use are maintained andenforced.

This concept is no less imperative in a data sharing digital economy - be it in relation toprofessional data ecosystems or the Personal Area Networks (PANS) of the hyperconnected
Cyber-Citizen.
The expectation of a Cyber-Citizen will be seamless collaboration between smart tools anddigital devices through highly secure, personalized portals. These connections will enable accessto public/private services via permission-based integration of live, interoperable, real-world data
through the use of sensors, meters, appliances, personal devices, and other tools and technicalcapabilities woven together.

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To enable this collaboration - along with the presupposed maintenance and enforcement of therights, trust and confidence across digital assets - a new architectural model must be created.
With this architecture, a Cyber-Citizen will have continuity of control and sovereignty acrosstheir data assets - wherein any individual, organization, application and or/process must havepermission from the data-owner to use said data asset(s) - and has realtime transparency on how
their data is being accessed and used. In addition, the data-owner can revoke/alter this permission
at any time - including, but not limited to the right to be forgotten.

THE LACK IN THE CURRENT STACK
While the premise that data-is-the-new-oil (or soil for growth) is, conceptually, the currency that
underpins the digital economy, the technology/architecture stack currently in use is based uponarchitectures and approaches that date back to the mid-20th Century. Thus, current technology isbased upon a foundational premise wherein:- computer memory is limited and expensive, resulting in complex programs and architecturesthat deal with the processing and management of data for each particular application;- disk space is slow, resulting in data caching on data storage devices for the optimization of theprocess, and is unlikely to have the concept of data-ownership and permission.

- computer networking is treated as a transport layer between two or more network end-points –there is no concept of data-owners and permissions; and- organizations are architected as “islands of business process automation” with tightly controlled/slowly changing supply chains.
The result of which is that there are still millions of applications and programs being developed,
which are focused on optimizing the process of a particular business function, while not focusing
on the security of the data or the data’s interoperability, which required to drive the businessitself.
Consequently, developers are designing a multitude of misaligned, proprietary technologies andinternet/web facing applications that are expensive, potentially insecure and, thus, unable toprovide stakeholders in the digital economy - be they customers, clients or CEOs - any consistentsemblance of trust/confidence that their data is safe.
The turbine engine, the radical replacement of the propeller, enabled the age of modern travel forthe general population, with the affordable tickets, reliability, safety and speed that wasimpossible for propellered flight - and ultimately creating confidence in intercontinentaltransport. An equally revolutionary shift, via a completely new technical architecture andapproach, is required to democratize and utilize data-at-scale for the digital economy and its
Cyber-Citizens.
As stated above, the basics of developing technology and the technological approaches to solving
business problems have not fundamentally changed since the 1960’s - you write some code thattakes in data and/or produces data, which you run on a CPU and then store the results to disk.
The approach to the internet and then the web etc. was to extend/enhance the networking
capability that enabled these applications and programs to communicate with other applications
and programs over a network.
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Subsequently, while we have substantially more CPU, disk space and networking capacity than
we had in the 60s the basics are, essentially, still the same - i.e. programs and applications arestill process focussed, with data essentially supporting the process. Currently any concept of data
permissions, sovereignty and security must be, when possible, “bolted on” as an add-on to thisapproach. This is done discordantly/inconsistently for most programs and applications inexistence, resulting in it being virtually impossible for a company of any significant size todiscern, and thus mitigate their risk across - let alone accountability for - what their potential
exposure is when utilizing data from these programs and applications. Given the explosion ofSoftware as a Service, it is quite possible that even small companies and individuals have theirdata stored in a number of different geographic jurisdictions with varying data laws and witheach application providing their own proprietary set of data security controls. thus making it very
difficult for them to understand what data security and compliance issues they may be deficit in.

ADDING A NEW LAYER
Our premise is that to enable a controllable, scalable and secure digital economy for the Cyber
Civilization, accountability for data interoperability, permission-based sharing and security
should be removed from the remit of application/product developers. Instead, when there is arequirement for interoperation and sharing we propose that the simplest way to do this is tocreate a new, vendor neutral, platform agnostic, Data Presentation layer, which is designed tosatisfy these requirements.

The concept, as illustrated above (Fig 1), shows this as a protocol enhancement to the TCP/IP
model protocol stack. The adjustment is, conceptually, analogous to adding a new ‘Data
Presentation’ layer between the Application and Transport layers in the stack.
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The objective of this is to ‘democratize’ and simplify data-at-scale, while enabling participating
stakeholders/Cyber-Citizens to communicate in their own data language/dialect as well as, andperhaps most importantly, enforcing and protecting their data rights in a vendor neutral, scalableand consistent manner. In addition, organizations of any size and scale are able to mitigate andcontrol their cyber security risk, while enabling real-time, permission-based, seamless datainteroperability and interconnection.
For interconnections between the general populace of the approaching Cyber Civilization toflourish, they must be empowered with multi-jurisdictional, data-at-scale governance capabilities
that, currently, are confined to entrenched tech giants and multi-nationals. These capabilities
must be extended to ensure 1) a data-owner’s control of personal and sensitive data at all levels;and 2) that said data can, with permission, be securely shared/utilized without the current
considerable costs and lengthy delivery times.
A 2020 global, cross-sector survey of seasoned data professionals found that more than 92% of
respondents suffered from disconnected and fragmented data and that it would typically taketheir organizations more than 1 month to implement a single, new, interoperational data flow more than 60% noted it could take anywhere between 3 and 12+ months for each connection tobe implemented. (Interoperational Data Flow (aka data integration) Survey, Q3, 2020,FlatWorld Integration Pty Ltd.).
It is our contention that the underlying problem should be redefined as one of friction. The
dimensions of this friction are: technical/implementation, business/user, financial, commercial(Intellectual Property permissions), legal/jurisdictional, scalability, compliance and risk
mitigation. From extensive cross-industry experience we have seen that, unless all of thesefriction issues are solved, data integration/interoperation projects generally fail to deliver on
promised results. While we have seen that there is often a large focus placed on technicalfriction, the other dimensions are not normally addressed adequately.
We believe it is unlikely that there will be any successful form of equitable, secure, datainteroperable capability for the digital economy of the new Cyber Civilization, unless all of thefriction dimensions are solved.
Solving friction as scale - the Architectural Solution / Data Presentation Layer
The new, Data Presentation Layer architectural solution, mentioned above, can be characterized
as a Universal Translator and/or Babel Fish for data. It is (Fig 2 below):- Vendor neutral and platform agnostic, enabling systems to communicate using their nativeformats and taxonomies, while also enabling that data to be utilized in the native formats andtaxonomies of consuming systems as per the users requirements/preference.
- Horizontally scalable and able to be deployed on premise, in the cloud, and/or a hybrid of bothof these.
- Able to ensure distributed data connections can be made by non-IT resources.
- API accessible by technologies such as Machine Learning and AI.
- No Code/Low Code, removing the requirement of significant and expensive technology
skillsets to perform data integration/management work.
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- Quickly and easily implementable (minutes instead of months), while satisfying the stringent
and complex business demands of data integration.
- Able to automatically and transparently enforce permissions, security andcompliance/governance regulations, while meeting the exacting requirements of sharing highly
valuable/sensitive data between systems, irrespective of geographic location or company.
- Inexpensive to operate - including a low carbon-footprint.
Perhaps most importantly, the Data Presentation Layer is focused on data sovereignty, enablingdata-owners to control how their data is to be used and/or shared; thus facilitating the effective

utilization of external/multi-jurisdictional data sources.
Moving from Star Wars to Star Trek
By implementing a Data Presentation layer we can, colloquially speaking, say that it willtransform Cyber Civilization from the realms of Star Wars to that of Star Trek.

By way of illustration, when thinking of the Star Wars saga, one cannot escape the reality of adysfunctional ecosystem of disparate entities who wanted to work together to accomplish a goal
(be it to create a trade federation or blow up a Death Star). However, their problem was that eachof the stakeholder organizations within the ecosystem had their own tools and technologies
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which, in the main, did not work together - if they did it was, more likely than not, arandom/accidental success with risk mitigation little more than fingers being crossed.
Conversely, the United Federation of Planets represented in Star Trek was a vast collaborative
affiliation of planets that were able to work together, efficiently and equitably, in realtime, while
using their own tools, technologies and languages. One of the reasons for this was the Universal
Translator which enabled constant, consistent collaboration capability and realtime
interoperability.
If, rather than Star Wars or Star Trek, one has a penchant for Douglas Adams, one mightreference the Babel Fish - which enabled immediate understanding of any and all languages forany user.
That said, Star Wars, Star Trek and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy are works of fiction but
what Cyber-Citizens of the Digital Economy require are facts and tools they can use now.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Conventional thinking and technologies paint this as a problem set of ‘Gordian Knot’
propensities; however, this Data Presentation layer solution can be achieved, on a global scale,relatively quickly and surprisingly inexpensively - not unlike the successful implementation ofremote working.
Much as an established, pre-Covid estimate as to how long it would like take to implement
remote working was 454 days - in actuality, it took a mere11 days, when working from homebecame compulsory. (See McKinsey Publishing’s year in review, 2021 for more detail). Why?
Because needs must.
The need is no less imperative for the Data Presentation layer to enable an equitable data
network for the digital economy of the new Cyber Civilization. Critically, it can be implementedin minutes, rather than months. Why? Because needs must.

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