Overview

In recent years, due to a great interest of both Industry and Academy in researching and developing data management technology, many solutions for different verticals and merging different data sources have been implemented. However, there is no global reference standard for data platform technology and we do not foresee one in the near future. Data platforms scenarios are characterized by a high-degree of heterogeneity at all levels, preventing deployment, federation and interoperability of existing solutions.

Although many projects/initiatives have dealt and/or are dealing with developing data platforms architectures in diversified application domains, not many projects have addressed integration in port environments with the possibility of including cognitive services/applications and extending/federating the platform to whole transportation routes covering whole Europe. Furthermore, no proposals (to date) have been put forward to deliver a general, fully reusable, and systematic approach to solve data platform deployments associated with port community systems and associated data.

Lack of interoperable, scalable, reliable data platforms causes major technological and business issues such as the impossibility to plug non-interoperable data sources into heterogeneous data platforms, the impossibility to develop applications to exploit heterogeneous data in homogeneous and/or cross domains, slowness of data technology introduction at a large-scale, discouragement in adopting data sharing technology, increase of costs, scarce reusability of data, user dissatisfaction, and lack of unified data governance mechanisms.

DataPorts will provide a data platform in which transportation and logistics companies around a seaport will be able to manage data like any other company asset, in order to create the basis to offer cognitive services.