Technologies

The NGI Sargasso Programme is focussed on accelerating the development of human-centric and trustworthy internet solutions that embody openness, inclusivity, and sustainability. Consequently, the programme focusses on the following thematic areas:

Trust

Data sovereignty

Digital identity

Internet architecture & renovation

Decentralized technology

Interoperability & standardization

New internet technology

Within the Medications Data Interoperability Project (MDIP), we are focussing on the following technology areas:

Artificial Intelligence – to assist us in the cleaning and structuring of complex medications data.
Blockchain – to establish provenance of data, to ensure that the data presented is completely trustworthy.

With these technologies, we intend to demonstrate how the NGI thematic areas can be delivered with new technology:

Trust - From where has our data been sourced? Is it trustworthy? We tackle this requirement by:

a) taking data only from authoritative sources, predominantly Medications Regulators in this project, and

b) writing sources to the Blockchain to create immutable records.

Internet Architecture and Renovation - By demonstrating how to take publicly avaialable data, combine and enrich it, and make it available to various users. This includes:

a) Citizens

b) Public authorities

c) Researchers and Start Up

d) Businesses

Decentralised Technology - In our project, we take existing data from existing databases. We expect that these systems will continue, but can be improved with a higher level system than can combine and integrate these data sets. This is a concept known as ‘federation’, where source data continues to be found in it’s current system, but is aggregated by system above.

Interoperability and Standardisation

refers to how data (it can also refer to physical objects, such as spare parts) can be introduced and used by other systems. The more specific the data is to one system, typically the more difficult it is to make it interoperable for many systems.

New Internet Technology can refer to either completely new technologies, or innovative combinations of existing innovative technologies into a new stack. We are using the latter approach, by combing AI, Blockchain and interoperability approaches into one stack.

Regarding the themes of Digital Identity and Digital Sovereignty, these focus more on a citizens personal data, which is out of scope of our MDIP project.

In the coming months, we’ll be releasing blogs, articles and videos that go in-depth into the various areas mentioned in the table above.

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