Unlocking the power of your data

Data Service as a Platform (DSaaP) is an online digital platform that will enable you to explore and analyse more high quality social and economic data, anytime, anywhere, in a safe and trusted environment.

Free at the point of access to all academics and non-commercial researchers, the open source platform will be fully available by the end of 2019.

Jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, Data Service as a Platform is being developed by the UK Data Service at the University of Essex.

  • "The use of Data Service as a Platform technology made a real difference to this project. The increased performance and scalability enabled UCL researchers to refine and test computationally intensive models at scale, while the suite of tools facilitated interactive exploratory analysis in much shortened timeframes. In effect, near real-time analysis on billions of data points is now possible while operating in a trusted, secure environment."

    Professor Tadj Oreszczyn
    Professor Tadj Oreszczyn Director of RCUK Centre for Energy Epidemiology (CEE) and University College London’s (UCL) Bartlett School of Environment Energy & Resources.

Features

Highly Scalable

Using industry standard commodity open source technology we are building a data infrastructure that supports a powerful computational platform that is well suited for a new generation of big data science. We have partnered with Hortonworks to implement a common reference architecture.

Hybrid solution

Using a combination of cloud services and on-premises storage, we can ensure that we have high availability but the data is held in the most appropriate location for you to access it securely. Both our public and private clouds adopt a common authentification approach using Kerberos.

Specialist training

With new technology comes new software and techniques to exploit these new data sources. We are able to provide support and training so you get the best out of these exciting new opportunities.

Non-commercial, free at point of access

The Platform is funded by the EPSRC and ESRC to provide access to centralised data resources and services to the academic community.

User friendly, easy to use brokering service for anyone to find data they need

A user friendly user interface will provide a single point of entry for all our data, wherever it comes from.

Adds enrichment

Holding all data in NoSQL (Not Only SQL) data structures provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that helps us to utilise a combination of machine learning and human beings to enhance our existing metadata records to provide better contextual information for use in data discovery and analysis.

Safe, secure and appropriate

Our experience of implementing the 5 safes principles will be reinforced by using the new technologies to provide more rigorous data risk assessment to assist data providers and data users. We are working to apply these principles at scale for all types of data.

Any type, anywhere, any time

Moving to non-proprietary formats allows us manage the data more efficiently, so whether its survey microdata, geographical, biomedical data or large energy data you will get a consistent user experience.

Multi-disciplinary

We can support a multitude of data from a range of disciplines, which can be discovered and combined to support cross-domain research at scale and complexity.

Find out how it works

Case studies