Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
Commun Axiom (Comax) is a suite of online and offline applications designed for non profits, small and medium businesses to facilitate data governance and data collaboration. Its intent is to make data sharing and data collaboration accessible to everyone by regrouping functionality from many different software sources into an easy to use, non invasive platform that supports decentralization and cohosting. An emphasis is put on the importance of protection of privacy, intellectual property and attribution as intrinsic part of the data governance process. To do that, many features are put in place to automate easily data ingestion and data transformation so that focus can be put on collaboration.
Although the software appears to be primarily focused on technological tooling, the platform as a whole is made to help you with data governance policies that implicitly show up again and again when trying to access or share datasets. The questions that come up are usually associated with privacy, identity protection and usage of the data. You might not have the time or resources to manually transform and anonymise datasets in order to make them shareable. You might not have the infrastructure and security required to expose apis and make the data accessible. You may lack the technical capability / capacity to automate generation of the said data, or you might simply want to leverage a platform that will allow you to focus on collaboration instead of putting all your efforts on the technical. Comax proposes three key features to simplify governance questions:
Talking about inter-organizational data governance implies communications and collaboration with your partners. Commun Axiom is designed in a way that helps you explore available data owned by your partners and by organisations that operate in the same circles by providing a simple search engine that matches keywords with datasources. Your can also navigate through available data portfolios and can make your own portfolios available to your partners and to the public. This in turn allows collaboration with other organisations in the same field. A communications infrastructure integrated in Commun Axiom allows direct communication with your partners either through direct messaging or by discussing on a specific subjects like a data source or the nature of a project. This helps you establish collaborative relationships with organisations that you might otherwise never have known about.
The portfolio is the main interface from which to work with data within Commons. It allows you to manage your own data sources as well a link to your partner's data sources. Specialized configuration steps and detailed authorizations allow you to define the transformations required for you to be able to share a specific data source with partners. Preconfigured transformations are provided on the platform to simplify and automate the work of anonymisation like one way hashing of specific fields, column / fields removal, geo-categorization, aggregates, etc. All of this, once configured, happens automatically through either a schedule or a change detection algorithm that ensures the data shared is as fresh as possible.
Although there is a limit to protecting the property on a dataset that you plan on sharing with your community, Commun Axiom tries to put in place an ecosystem that encourages attribution and respect of the constraints you try to enforce on your own data. This is done by leveraging a blockchain to track data access authorizations and agreements made when accessing said information. When a user accesses a datasource you're exposing, an agreements page is shown detailing the authorizations and limitations present on the data prior to accessing it. Any user trying to access the information will have to agree with those limitations and this agreement, when numerically signed, is perpetually recorded on the blockchain.
When we come together as a community to help each other and collaborate, we can accomplish great things. Commun Axiom allow for more than just sharing and accessing data. Many roles on a Comax ecosystem can help build knowledge and understanding around the issues that affect communities. This can be by providing BI and data transformation services to partners on the network. It can also be by exposing dashboards that are fed by the network and allow partners to learn more about their data. Comax enables organisations to provide services associated to their specialty without having the overhead technical and operational cost associated to data collaboration.