Main Usage Flows for Data Providers and Data Consumers
In this section we present the core operations that can be executed by users of PISTIS.
Data Owners can:
- Upload Data from their company environment to their own Data Factory Environment. This flow, also called "Data Registration" includes all the prerequisite activities that need to happen before a Data Provider chooses to create a listing and are revolving around uploading the data to the Data Factory of the Data Provider, and the treatment of those data to transform them into quality assets that hold more possibilities to be sold over the platform. This flow starts with the onboarding (via upload) of data into the platform, and the next steps have to do with transforming the data, identifying insights withing the data,
- Manage the Uploaded Data to improve its quality and bring them in the desired marketable form. This step, includes semantically enriching the uploaded data and mapping them to a data model, and checking their quality. During those steps, data are stored in the data storage facility of the Data Factory and lineage is tracked, and the final output becomes part of the Factory Data Catalogue (at metadata description level) and they data itself is stored in the Data Factory Storage. The above-mentioned components are orchestrated by the Job Configurator Component. Other optional steps in this flow include the GDPR checking of the data, as well as the Anonymisation of the data, while encryption methods might also be applied, to increase the security of the data, and make them also compliant with possible regulations that might exist regarding the retention and storing of data.
- Push to the Market the listing of their data (e.g. publish publicly metadata only) using various monetisation methods. This flow, called "Data Publication" can be triggered once data is available in the Data Factory of a user, and he would like to make a listing. The user selects the data out of their own Data Catalogue and triggers the components to set the access policies for this dataset when it becomes available on the PISTIS Marketplace, defines the monetisation methods, checks the data valuation suggestions for the specific dataset and finally creates a bundle of the data asset and sends it to the PISTIS Marketplace so that it becomes available for acquisition by the, in the contract settings, permitted users, while at the same time this listing alongside with the template of the acquisition contract terms are also stored in the blockchain.
Data Consumers can
- Browse the Catalogue of published data and acquire these assets following the execution of a monetary transaction. This flow, called also "Data Discovery and Acquisition" includes the steps that are relevant to the monetary transactions and the data transfer. As such, this flow commences with a Data Consumer searching over the catalogue and identifying a dataset and committing to acquire it. The monetary transactions take place after a set of checks, and this transaction is recorded in the IOTA and the PISTS ledgers and the data asset is becoming available to the user. At this point, the Data Factory Connector takes place and after performing the necessary checks to check the validity of a transaction, copies the data payload from the Data Factory of the buyer to that of the seller (or fully transfers it in the case this was an NFT-based transaction).