We’d like to make using data as simple as using the World Wide Web.
What do we mean by ‘federated data ecosystem’?
Data are distributed across millions of databases on systems all around the world. To allow everyone to have their own localised legal controls and rules, data needs to ‘sit’ in a location (organisation) and jurisdiction (country) that can manage it.
The question is then how to make it easy to find, access and use data across organisational and country boundaries. The architecture of the Web manages this for pages, and has many technical solutions to achieving this for data (commonly referred to as an ‘API’ or ‘Application Programming Interface’).
Working out the (non-technical) rules for data sharing needs many more people to come together and agree on legal controls, business value exchange, intellectual property and so on.
A federated approach allows local databases to retain control and autonomy while being connected to the Web of Data.