New funding stream for open data sharing solutions
The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is seeking innovative ideas for open data sharing solutions in Defence. Submit your innovative ideas by 9 July 2019.
This funding stream, providing up to £100k through a new Innovation Focus Area (IFA) for Defence, is launching today (Tuesday 4 June 2019).
Vast amounts of data sets are generated from multiple sources across Defence. A Type 45 Destroyer, for instance, over the course of a day can produce up to 10 million lines of data. The proliferation of data within the military poses a significant challenge for operators, but also presents an opportunity for interpreting differing data sets into meaningful information upon which to make informed and timely decisions.
Defence needs to share the information it generates with the wider Defence community for the collation, analysis and future management of data. This is vital if, for example, we are to analyse and predict the effects of different environments or scenarios on the condition of military assets and equipment; and predict when such equipment is in need of repair or replacement. The ability for operators to extract such information could save Defence time and money, and could even save lives.
To keep pace with the proliferation of data, Defence needs to continually increase an individual’s ability to analyse and utilise such data and to do this we need to share information with other nations, other government departments, across the services and with our supply base. The challenge for us is to share this information quickly and effectively whilst maintaining the appropriate levels of security.
The funding comes as a direct result of listening to our stakeholders in industry and academia at a DASA led ‘Hackathon’. Attendees at the event called for more funding to be available and greater sharing of available data to develop services to address Defence’s current challenge of open data sharing.
The longer-term aim of this research will be the development of predictive maintenance tools, and provision of evidence-based recommendations to optimise inventory checks, which could extend the life of components.
The ‘Delivery and open data sharing solution’ IFA seeks ideas that have the potential to analyse and share quickly structured and unstructured multi-source data, whilst maintaining its security classification. Innovative ideas should be submitted for the next Open Call for Innovation deadline on the 9th July.