Observing data in IoT worlds: What and how to observe?

The widespread adoption of “smart devices' and sensors in various domains such as, transport, home, critical infrastructure, and wellbeing has given rise to highly dynamic data ecosystems. The data in these ecosystems is a goldmine for data-driven decision making for a variety of stakeholders. These stakeholders exploit multiple device capabilities, re-purpose and re-contextualize data collected by the devices for a number of applications. Such IoT ecosystem(s) mandate data sharing at both small and large scale. However, sensitive nature of IoT data, lack of prior knowledge of purpose of data-use, regulations and standards make data sharing a non-trivial problem. It also raises concerns of data trust, ownership, and accountability. In this paper, we scope the “IoT Observatory” infrastructure to enable various stakeholders to observe and analyse the data and methodologies in IoT enabled ecosystems. It details the architectural components of IoT observatory and describe how its socio-technical lens can identify technical and ethical challenges for sharing IoT data. The paper further explains applicability of the observatory infrastructure in a smart city ecosystem. The main contributions of the paper are: (i) the definition of trust, accountability, transparency in context of IoT observatory; (ii) identification of variables that can be observed through IoT observatory for establishing trust and transparency in data sharing; and (iii) use of data access traces on IoT observatory to explain ownership and accountability.