One of the main objectives of AEGIS is to drive data-focused innovation that expands over multiple business sectors and takes into consideration structured, unstructured and multilingual data sets, rejuvenates the existing models and facilitates companies and organisations in the Public Safety and Personal Security (PSPS) linked sectors to provide better and personalised services to their users.
Considering the user-centered character of AEGIS, during the first months of the project we designed a questionnaire to better understand which the needs of our stakeholders are and to define the first high-level requirements. The survey is still open and available at the following link: https://goo.gl/iPYr87.
In total, we received 77 replies to the questionnaire that were analysed and contributed to the definition of a Big Data value chain for Public Safety and Personal Security (PSPS). Such results were also named as ‘high level requirements’ and were the basis for the definition of the user requirements (i.e. the requirements of our AEGIS demonstrators).
The large majority (almost 50%) of the responses to the questionnaire is coming from the IT industry as Figure 1 shows. There was also a good geographical distribution as all the countries of the partners of the project were covered and there were replies from Portugal, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Nederland, United Kingdom, Cyprus Spain and, outside Europe, Mexico, Argentina, United States.
Even though the participants typically belonged to the broad IT sector, we discovered a low utilisation rate of the data collected, including the ones pointed out as most relevant; in fact, 56% of the respondents are used to process less than 10% of the data collected and only around 20% of them analyse more than 50% of the data collected.
The most relevant data types collected and analysed identified through the questionnaire are reported in the following table. Concerning the data sources, the most exploited sources at the moment are: Log, Transactions, Events, Sensors and Open Data, which are also amongst the data that companies expect to exploit in the next 5 years together with Social Media and Free-Form Text. It is noted that little interest has been shown in Phone usage, Reports to Authorities, RFID Scans or POS Data, Earth, Space and Geospatial data.
The forecast for the near future points out a small increase trend in both collection and analysis of data. Despite the general low rate of adoption of Big Data analytics at the moment, there is high potential for future increase, especially as the Big Data analytics tools will fit better with the user needs (i.e. only 26% of the respondents indicate that they already have the tools for Big Data management, yet 70% are effectively experimenting or beginning to use Big Data).
Moreover, the low utilization of big data can be ascribed to the difficulty in using the available tools, the heterogeneity of the data (i.e. structured and unstructured, different languages), privacy, security and organizational issues. The large percentage of multilingual data and the lack of accurate translating tools are also critical points: only one organisation out of six has the right tools to handle unstructured data expressed in natural language. While 50% of the respondents answered that they have the tools to translate data between languages, there is no mainstream commercial tool used for this purpose by the respondents.
Another key point that became evident from the questionnaire is that data collection and analysis are mainly in-house (65%) while data sharing with other entities is less than 40%. In fact, only 36.5% of respondents share data with other entities: most of them with customers, public administration or government entities but also with suppliers or partner companies and the reported added value includes: Collaboratively developing new services, communication and brand building and better decision making.
The AEGIS project is fully aligned and highly focused on addressing the market needs identified in this survey that signified the beginning for our research to identify the PSPS stakeholders’ needs. For further information, you may have a look at the complete analysis of the stakeholder’s questionnaire in the AEGIS Deliverable D1.1 “Domain Landscape Review and Data Value Chain Definition”, available at (https://www.aegis-bigdata.eu/public-results/).
Blog post authors: Elisa Rossi & Cinzia Rubattino (GFT)