IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 69

to manage issues such as data ownership and use, security, residency, privacy, and the protection of fundamental rights.1
No international organization is currently mandated
to coordinate the development, maintenance and use
of technical standards covering data value chains and
policy-oriented standards covering data governance.
-Standards setting activities in this field is fragmented
between hundreds of organizations. As no data standards registry is maintained, stakeholders and experts
alike are struggling to find out what data standards
have been published, who is working on new documents
and whether there are gaps that need to be addressed.

CIGI's Policy Brief entitled Standards for the Digital Economy: Creating an
Architecture for Data Collection, Access and Analytics" [13] provides more
information on data value chains and on the key topics that need to be
addressed through a standards based data governance framework.

This makes it extremely challenging to set priorities for
future standards work.

The Need for International Digital Cooperation
As data flows increase and the cost of data storage continues to drop, the international community has an
opportunity to engage in digital cooperation projects to
address systemic problems through new insights generated from big data analytics.
In terms of volume, it is estimated that around 90
percent of all the data in human history was created in
the past two years [1]. In its recent Digital Economy
Report 2019, the United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development (UNCTAD) forecasts that global Internet protocol traffic, a proxy for data flows, will grow
from 46 600 GB per second in 2018 to 150 700 GB per
second in 2022 [2, p. 9]. The number of Internet of
Things (IoT) devices, which will drive a growing

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 global goals set by the United Nations General Assembly
in 2015 for the year 2030. In its recently released report, the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Digital
Cooperation recommended the creation of digital collaboration platforms to make progress towards the SDGs. Through
globally accepted interoperability standards, it would be possible to create data value chains focused on resolving systemic
problems. Data collaboratives have already been established to begin to address some of the goals. Looking forward, data
sharing platforms would facilitate the collection of the right data from participating nations, the management of access
rights to data to meet regulatory and ethical requirements and provide a space for academics and AI firms to generate new
insights. With the right interoperability standards, it would also be possible to exchange data between platforms to look at
problems from a broader, multi-disciplinary perspective.
FIGURE 1. Addressing United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) through digital cooperation [6].

JUNE 2020

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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