Late 2019, one of our founders got involved in a financial supply chain project to modernise the end-to-end lifecycle of data products.
Part of this involved collaborating with the marketdata extension as part of ODRL.
This problem space is fascinating for many reasons:
- an extremely flexible and useful language that can cover any digital asset.
- a 2 decade old standard with no significant industrial presence.
- has a large academic following, with very active support.
Like all problems, it is not a straightforward journey from requirements to product, and for a couple of years there were significant challenges on how to build a useful ecosystem that would allow users to focus on what matters:
the rights and obligations of the data products they own.
As the scope unravelled, new ancillary interests have raised:
- a purely distributed ecosystem;
- based on strong semantics;
- creation of innovative ways of work to accelerate the ecosystem build and distribution.
The problem is widespread: finance, energy, corporate, individual, even wood products are moving to have a digital twin that showcases the end-to-end supply chain.