Universitat de Lleida — MVG Research Portal
To accelerate the progress of research and science, increase the quality of data, and foster collaboration, deltaDAO AG developed the Universitat de Lleida MVG Research Portal in cooperation with the University of Lleida, a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based proof of concept for an open Minimal Viable Gaia-X (MVG) Research Portal built on Ocean Protocol.
The Universitat de Lleida MVG Portal enables universities and other research and educational institutions to find, consume and share research data sets and algorithms. Depending on the publisher’s decision, the data assets can be consumed either by granting compute or download access to the data assets. By tokenizing data assets and using smart contracts to manage access control, each transaction, which includes publishing, sale, exchange, and consumption of data services, is logged automatically on the immutable distributed ledger. This creates a data audit trail for academia which allows research institutions to monitor the use of their assets and gain attribution for their work.
Moreover, research institutions can decide whether the access to the data assets is granted for free or if data services are monetized to cover the costs of generating and storing the data, or for researching and developing algorithms.
“Many research institutions, specially those publicly funded like public universities, have committed towards the FAIR Principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and beyond, open research and open science. This requires not just open access to data, but also algorithms, and mechanisms to guarantee proper academic credit. The decentralization technologies powering the Universitat de Lleida MVG Portal make all this possible. Its Compute-to-Data approach facilitates tokenisation of both data and algorithms, enhanced privacy and full accountability of all interactions. All in all, the Gaia-X initiative, powered by Ocean Protocol and built by deltaDAO AG, constitutes a milestone to make open research a reality.”
- Roberto García, Deputy Vice-Rector for Research & Transfer, Associate Professor, Universitat de Lleida
In the first step, the Universitat de Lleida will contribute datasets and algorithms related to the agrifood domain. They consist of images of apples and 3D point clouds generated from the images used for developing, training, and testing either own algorithms or for training and testing algorithms for fruit detection and size estimation available on the portal.
Minimal Viable Gaia-X (MVG) — powered by Ocean Protocol
The Minimal Viable Gaia-X Demonstrator built by deltaDAO using the Ocean tech stack is a Web3 interpretation of the Gaia-X Federation Services and Registry. deltaDAO demonstrated that Ocean Protocol provides most Gaia-X core functionality today, enabling a decentralized Data Economy in line with the Gaia-X vision.
Read more about the Minimal Viable Gaia-X (MVG) powered by Ocean Protocol.
Algorithms can be trained and tested on data sets using Compute-to-Data. In that way, one of the above-mentioned trusted algorithms is brought to the data and executed on-premise, instead of moving the data around. After execution, the results are returned to the data consumer.
Outlook
Using verifiable credentials that are now being implemented into the MVG, the University of Lleida can potentially grant free or discounted access to their data assets to other selected research or educational institutions.
About deltaDAO
deltaDAO AG, located in Hamburg, is the first Ocean Protocol engineering, integration and consulting company, by Ocean Protocol community members. We are working closely with BigchainDB GmbH and the Ocean Protocol Foundation to achieve our common mission to kickstart a European Data Economy. We are a Gaia-X member active in several working groups and initiatives. deltaDAO is a co-organizer of the Gaia-X Hackathon, responsible for the “Compute-to-Data & Distributed Ledger Technology” track where we, as Web 3.0 specialists and integrators, build towards a Minimal Viable Gaia-X with the other Gaia-X community members.
