DPS Compliance to the Data Act

Servitly DPS provides all the functionalities you need to be compliant with the EU Data Act and deal with its technical implications.

Prepare for Raw Data sharing:

Raw Data Definition: define the Raw Data involved in data sharing
Metadata Documentation: document Raw Data

Share Raw Data with users:

Data Export: let your customers and third-party users to export Raw Data

Deal with third parties and allow users to share Raw Data with them:

Third-party Registration: let third-party service providers to self-register in the DPS, and, as Data Recipients chosen by users, allow them to access customer data
Data Sharing Authorizations: allow customers to manage third-party permissions to access their Raw Data
Data API Access: allow third-party clients to access customer’s data through API

Manage compensation collection:

Data Access Subscriptions: manage subscriptions and collect a compensation fee from third-parties accessing customer data

Raw Data Definition

The first step to allow Raw Data export and sharing through APIs is defining which data is involved.
Within the Console, you can leverage the concept of Metric Set, which is used to group similar metrics (e.g. by topic, by usage) and define permissions for accessing data sets. In the DPS, a Raw Data metric set is used when users want to export data or make API calls.

The predefined Metric Set Raw Data is used to define which metrics are to be considered Raw according to the Raw Data definition by the Data Act.

In most cases, Servitly's concept of Raw Data matches with the Data Act definition, but in some cases Raw Data metrics may also be used to publish data that is the result of a processing function (e.g. edge computing). For this reason, by default, all the Raw Data metrics are included in the predefined Metric Set called Raw Data. It is up to the Console user to define whether some metrics must be excluded from this metric set.

Metadata Documentation

To fulfill the obligation to document Raw data, in the Console for each metric you can:

define a technical name and a friendly label;
define the short description of the metric;
specify the unit of measurement to which the values refer;
define the technical description of the metric, for instance data format, sampling frequency, publishing policy. You do this leveraging the Console feature Project Notes.

Example of Project Notes for a Raw metric

The DPS users access the page Data Documentation where to find the details of each metric they can read.

Data Export

To fulfill the obligation to share Raw data with users, you can leverage the Data Export function.
In the DPS, users can use the Data Export widget, where they will be able to easily export the Raw Data generated by the connected products they are authorized to see.

By default, when a new Data Export is created, all the Raw Data metrics are exported, but optionally, the user can select other Metric Sets (if defined) or other metrics according to the user permission to access such metrics.

Third-party Registration

To fulfill the obligation to share Raw data with third parties, firstly you need to manage third-parties in the DPS.

In the DPS, third-parties can be managed by using the concept of Partner.
A Partner can be manually registered by the organization back-office, or you can enable self-registration.

By enabling self-registration, you allow third parties to register themselves in the DPS.
Here are the main steps of the self-registration process:

A third party wishes to access customer data and provide additional services to the DPS customers.
From the DPS login page, a third-party manager can initiate a self-registration process.
During the registration, the third-party user must provide details such as company name, company size (SME or LE), contact information, and any other relevant information.
To complete registration, the user must also accept the application's agreements, which include the general terms of service, privacy policy, and any additional agreements required by the organization.
Once the process is completed, a new Partner entity is created in DPS along with the manager user.
However, access to the DPS remains pending until the organization’s back office approves it.
The back-office team receives an email notification related to the new third-party registration request.
By following the link in the email, they can review the submitted information and approve the third party to access the DPS.
The third-party manager receives a confirmation email and gains access to DPS.
They may also create additional users under the same third-party entity (e.g. colleagues).

At this point, the third party can access the DPS, but until a customer decides to share data with them, there will be nothing to see.

Data Sharing Authorizations

To fulfill the obligation to share Raw data with third parties upon request by the user, you can leverage the Raw Data Authorization.

In the DPS, Customer users can manage the authorizations of registered third parties to access Raw Data.

The Raw Data Authorization flow is composed by the following steps:

A customer wants to share Raw Data with a third-party service provider.
The customer enters the Account / Data page, and within the Third-party Data Sharing Authorizations list can invite a new third-party to access their data.
It is also possible to specify the end date after that the third party will no longer able to access customer data.
The third-party manager user receives a data sharing invitation via email, or in the alternative, they can view invitations to access data from the data management page.
It is up to the third party to decide whether to accept or refuse the invitation.
By accepting the invitation, the third party will be able to access customer data via API or Data Export directly from the DPS.

Note that, when the third party (Partner) accept the data sharing invitation, it gains access to view the customer’s things.
Optionally in case a Digital Plan has been configured for Partners, also the related Subscription is updated.

Data API Access

To fulfill the obligation to share Raw data with third parties, you can leverage data API access.

To allows a third party to make API request:

the organization creates an API Key for the partner.
the partner uses the API as described in the article How to make API request

These are the API endpoints used by the partner:

Get all things: it retrieves the list of all things that have been authorized by Customers to the Partner.
Get thing metric values: it retrieves the metric values giving a thing ID, a metric name, and other parameters (start/end timestamp, aggregation, etc.) .
Get thing metrics last value: it retrieves the last value of multiple metrics giving a thing ID and a set of metric names.

Third-parties can only access data:

related to metrics included in the Metric Set Raw Data
related to customers have authorized them to access.

Data Access Subscriptions

In order to exploit the right to request a compensation fee to third-parties, you can leverage the Digital Services feature.

In the Console when you define Digital Plans or Add-ons for partners, you can enable the access to Raw Data via API.
For instance, here below we can see that Partners can subscribe to the RAW Data Access add-on with cost of 10 €/thing/year.

In this way, when a third party (Partner) accepts a Customer invitation to access data, the Subscription is updated with the new things of the customer, and thus also the subscription fee is updated.
A third party can access to customer data only if the Subscription has been paid.

The Organization back-office can view and manage subscriptions of partners from a dedicated page.

Ongoing Features
Note that, some features included in this article (Metric Sets, Data Documentation Page, Third-party Registration, Raw Data Authorizations, Digital Services) are still on development, and therefore not yet made public.