An Emerging Decentralized Services Computing Paradigm for Big Data Governance: A Position Paper

Abstract

With the explosion of “big data” in the past decade, exploring and mining the value hidden in the data has already generated a lot of innovative applications, especially the recent advances of AI applications. The data governance, including activities of data creation, sharing, exchange, management, analytics, tracing, and accounting, has drawn a lot of attentions. Services computing establishes the foundation of current data governance, typically in a centralized fashion, e.g., the cloud-based storage services and analytic services. However, the potential values of big data distributed on the Internet are far away from being adequately explored. Considering the infrastructure revolution made by the blockchain, in this position article, we try to rethink a new data governance fashion that is built upon the blockchain-based decentralized services computing paradigm. The core principle is that data owners are able to publish their data as a set of services that can be deployed independently from the application systems where the data were born. Meanwhile, data owners can define service rules/policies where their data should be stored and how the data can be shared, and keep governing the whole lifecycle record of how their data are actually used. Similar to existing services computing paradigm, data users can search, discover, integrate, and analyze the data in a decentralized fashion. With this perspective, we try to discuss some key insights and enumerate several related new technologies and open challenges, in terms of programmability, interoperability, and intelligence.