UPDATED 21:32 EDT / JULY 23 2019

BIG DATA

Microsoft wants to ‘open-source’ data sharing among companies

Microsoft Corp. today proposed a number of data-sharing agreements for companies that want to share information across different computing systems and services.

At present, sharing of information is a bit of a messy business because of a lack of consistent and standardized terms and licensing agreements, Microsoft said.

To try to fix the problem, the software giant has published three draft proposals of data sharing agreements covering various common scenarios. The company said it’s now looking for feedback and input on the agreements, which are covered by Creative Commons licenses and have been published on Microsoft’s Data Innovation blog.

In a blog post on LinkedIn, Erich Andersen, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and chief IP counsel, said the agreements are designed to spare companies “months or years” of negotiating in order to create their own contracts.

Essentially, what Microsoft is trying to do is create a kind of open-source license structure for data sharing, Andersen said. The open-source industry benefits from a number of pre-approved licenses, including the Apache and the BSD licenses, that companies can easily use when they want to share source code.

“We’re looking to do for data what open source did for code,” Andersen wrote in the blog post.

The proposals include an Open Use of Data Agreement that’s meant to govern the sharing of open datasets that don’t include personal data or data owned by a data provider. This is the most open and least restrictive contract, Microsoft said.

The second proposal is the Computational Use of Data Agreement, which covers data sets for AI training purposes that contain third-party materials. The agreement covers datasets in which some of the information is open and some is copyright-protected. The data can be used for training AI models, but the protected elements can’t be republished or redistributed.

The last proposal is called the Data Use Agreement for Open AI Model Development, and is designed for “underlying data with elements which may involve privacy or when data may be proprietary to the controller of the data.”

Constellation Research Inc. analysts Holger Mueller and Ray Wang told SiliconANGLE the proposed agreements are an important step because AI technology is set to become pervasive across all organizations and enterprises in the not-too-distant future.

“CXOs need to look at machine learning and AI to accelerate their enterprises, and these technologies are inherently data driven,” Mueller said. “But that’s where the problems start from a usage, privacy, access, statutory and regulatory level.”

Wang added that the data used in trading AI models will be the secret sauce that drives competitive advantage. “The challenge today is that we have not defined property rights around data and so these agreements are a good first step towards helping organizations work with each other on this data,” he said. “Over time, benchmarking data will be less important and derived data and data derivatives will be where the value is.”

Microsoft said the agreements would also help to further its recently announced Open Data Initiative. It was formed alongside Adobe Inc. and SAP SE and aims to provide a single, unified view of customer data across those companies’ various systems.

ODI is meant to “re-imagine customer experience management” by integrating customer relationship management, enterprise resource management, sales, commerce and product data into a single view that can be accessed from any device.

Image: Microsoft

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