Today, the non-profit IOTA Foundation said it will be working with the Linux Foundation on its data provenance initiative Project Alvarium. The Linux Foundation is the creator of the Hyperledger project which acts as an umbrella for multiple open-source blockchain protocols.
The Alvarium project will utilize IOTA’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) to track multiple data sources accurately. IOTA’s solution is not precisely blockchain, as it employs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) or Tangle, which is open source and feeless.
The Linux Foundation said it is building the concept of a Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) to establish a source of data and increase trust between parties. The project code will be seeded by Dell Technologies, with support from ARM, IBM, IOTA, MobiledgeX, OSIsoft, Unisys, and a few others.
“Project Alvarium is coming at an integral time as the intersection of control over data, transparency and privacy touch just about every single organization and person. IOTA’s inherent trust layer was developed specifically to address these challenges, and we look forward to the technology being a core enabler in Data Confidence Fabric,” said David Sønstebø, Co-founder, IOTA Foundation.
The DCF is a trust fabric which will be inserted into data flows to generate a data confidence score. The data passing through public and private networks will be accompanied by provenance details, the confidence score, and the policies set by the data owner on what can be shared. This is somewhat similar to what blockchain identity firms are doing, i.e. give control of data to its owners.
“Data Confidence Fabrics address three inherent and often conflicting challenges within the massive debate over data– how to keep control in the hands of the owner, how to allow for its public use and which data to trust,” said Dominik Schiener, co-founder, IOTA Foundation.
Germany-based IOTA Foundation has been working on developing new distributed ledger technologies. As its name implies, its focus is mainly on utilizing the internet of things (IoT) over a decentralized network. A few months ago, IOTA partnered with STMicroelectronics to enable its IoT technology on more devices.
Last month, it launched a decentralized marketplace for automated trading of goods and services. IOTA is also working with Primority for DLT food traceability.
