Data can generate valuable insights to solve problems not only for business, but also for government and society. And for this, it needs to be available, organized and secure.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is applying its computing capacity, security solutions and governance capabilities to tackle data challenges and empower data projects that are meaningful to society, particularly related to food and health, according to Janice Zdankus (pictured), vice president of innovation for social impact at HPE.

Through its Tech for Good program, the company intends to create dataspace platforms where data can be exchanged and prepared for use by data scientists.

“We have been working with a number of clients and partners to actually work on AI contributions, high performance compute contributions and a contribution around this notion of dataspaces,” she said. “All of these emerged through complex interactions around social good engagement.”

Zdankus spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover event. They discussed the challenges surrounding data usage, how the power of HPE technology can help democratize that data, and why the company chose the open-source path to drive social impact initiatives. (* Disclosure below.)

Data governance is critical

The first challenge data scientists face is finding the right data sources. And when that happens, they still need to see if the data is in the right format and how expensive it is to move it to a place where it can actually be analyzed. The work is so arduous and time-consuming that a new role, data hunter, has emerged on the market, according to Zdankus. Moreover, a large amount of data is at the edge and will likely never leave it.

“What we’re trying to do is recognize that and actually work to bring the algorithms and the analytics to the data and to work with making sure that data is accessible and can be understood and processed in a consistent way,” she said.

Still to increase data availability, HPE wants to connect data producers and data consumers in dataspaces. But to share their data, producers require security, reliability and controls over who can view their data and under what conditions. This is where data governance data comes in.

“Our approach is to kind of build the exchange for that so that data consumers understand the conditions in which they can access and use the data, and also potentially contribute back the new datasets that they’re creating through their analytics back into a cataloguing, a provisioning of data,” Zdankus explained. “This improving … the standardization and the simplicity of how data gets exchanged today, in effect, allows a greater democratization of access of data.”

HPE has decided that it will drive these initiatives through open-source projects and that it will provide a metadata layer to help connect data scientists to analytic platforms. Recently, the company joined the Linux Foundation in a new open-source community called AgStack, which aims to improve global agriculture efficiency through the creation, maintenance and enhancement of specialized digital infrastructure for data and applications.

“We are a founding company as part of that new community, and we have shared the concepts around data spaces and the metadata layer standardization that we’ve envisioned,” Zdankus said. “That’s just getting kicked off, but it’s also a great first step for us to kind of build an open-source community around it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE