Smart data: a significant opportunity

In this World of Smart Data blog, Layla Robinson from Research Data Scotland, reflects on public and private collaboration.

At Research Data Scotland, we believe that enabling better access to data about people, places and businesses can advance the health and wellbeing of citizens.

Our work is already making it faster and simpler for accredited researchers to access the information they need. We are helping them to unlock public sector data and making it available for research purposes. This opens opportunities for research that can change society.

But that’s not the whole picture.

Our digital lives

The COVID-19 pandemic had a double effect when it comes to data. It revealed gaps, such as equalities data. It also accelerated the expansion of our digital lives. Services moved online. People who would buy things in person started buying online. This activity creates large amounts of person-specific data. Accessing and researching this data across populations can help us get a deeper understanding of who we are. What we do. How we live. And where we’re going.

We believe these digital footprints – or smart data – could have real power if linked with public sector data. Linking them could create much more detailed pictures of our lives. This would enable policymaking to be made on increasingly accurate information and insights.

Private data for public good

We know that smart data comes from a diverse range of sources, such as:

mobile apps
navigation systems
social media
sensors in consumer devices and the environment
digital transactions

Smart data can be about people, organisations, systems or physical spaces. But this data is usually held by private data controllers – accessing it is one of the great challenges of trying to bring smart data into use for research purposes.

Our Researcher Access Service

Earlier this year, we launched a new service for researchers. It’s a streamlined service to access Scottish public sector data. We’re building this iteratively and in collaboration with the eDRIS team at Public Health Scotland.

As part of this endeavour, we’re interested in bringing together a range of private and public sector data in a way that is available to accredited researchers to trial use cases relevant to policymakers. This will take time to develop, but for example:

Using private sector financial data from Smart Data Foundry, and linking that with other data to look at issues like poverty, the cost-of-living crisis and the value of early interventions.
Measuring physical activity and linking it to population data. For instance, a study by Children in Scotland with Growing Up in Scotland looked into this, but it was very challenging and the physical activity data was purposely collected rather than being able to use existing private sector data. The same principle could apply to privately held self-reported data and would be valuable.
Linking alcohol sales to population-level data would be interesting and useful for public health research, although routine reporting would be required from the retail sector.

We’re keen to explore making data available when it links to different sources. Data and technology help us understand, communicate and address the challenges our societies face. But we need investment and engagement to harness the potential and do this in an inclusive way.

Building trust among data owners and the public

Conducting research for the first time with datasets that contain sensitive and personal data will need support from the public and from data controllers. They’ll both need assurance that our way of working is sound on data security and ethics, and that the benefits are balanced between data owners and society at large. At Research Data Scotland, we can build on our expertise in public engagement and synthetic data to build trust and increase capability within the research community.

On public engagement, we work with the Scotland Talks Data public panel to ensure transparency. Panel participants have helped researchers and partners better understand public viewpoints on the use of administrative data for research. We are also leading on public engagement and involvement work on various projects. Building a diverse contact group for user engagement with different stakeholders across the data landscape.

Our synthetic data working group is pioneering approaches to the development of synthetic datasets that enable researchers to test methodology without actually receiving real data. In some projects, researchers and data controllers have noted that low-fidelity synthetic data is all that is needed for their purposes. This may be an option for data controllers who are more sensitive to the potential risks of sharing data for research purposes.