Φ Pardalis Data Ownership Blog

Pardalis has developed methods for empowering end-users to asynchronously and granularly author and publish traceable, immutable data objects in competitively-segmented supply chains. These methods are supply chain agnostic and complimentary to synchronous, collaborative workspaces employed in the Cloud for B2B multi-tenant networking by small businesses, enterprises, and the public sector. We call these Common Point Authoring methods, or CPA for short.

CPA is timely and relevant because what we have seen, especially since 9/11, are that fear factors revolving around data ownership are multiplying from the every increasing usage of unique identification on the Internet as applied to both people (e.g., social security numbers) and products (e.g., unique electronic product numbers and RFID tags).

Q&A: What is an data object?

Consider the electronic form of this document (the one you are reading right now) as an example of a data object. Imagine that you are the author and owner of this data object. Imagine that each paragraph of this object has a granular on/off switch that you control. Imagine being able to granularly control who sees which paragraph even as your data object is electronically shared one-step, two-steps, three-steps, etc., down a supply chain with people or businesses you have never even heard of.

The methods for CPA were first envisioned in regards to transforming the authoring of paper-based material safety data sheets (MSDSs) in the chemical industry into a market-driven, electronic service provided by chemical manufacturers for their supply chain customers. You may think of MSDSs as a type of chemical pedigree document authored by chemical manufacturers and then handed down a multi-party supply chain as it follows the trading of the chemical.

At the time, we crunched some numbers and found that MSDSs offered as a globally accessible software service could be provided to downstream users for significantly less than what it cost them to handle paper MSDSs. But we further recognized that our business model for global software services wouldn’t work very well unless the fear factors revolving around MSDSs offered as a service were technologically addressed.

That is, we asked the question, “How can electronic data be granularly controlled by the original author as it is shared down a supply chain?”

The prior art (i.e., the prior patents and other published materials) to CPA at best refers to collaborative document editing systems where multiple parties share in the authoring of a single document. A good example of the prior art is found in a 1993 Xerox patent entitled 'Updating local copy of shared data in a collaborative system' (US Patent 5,220,657 - Xerox) covering:

“A multi-user collaborative system in which the contents as well as the current status of other user activity of a shared structured data object representing one or more related structured data objects in the form of data entries can be concurrently accessed by different users respectively at different workstations connected to a common link.”

[Original image modified for size and/or readability]By contrast, CPA's methods provide for granular authoring and sharing of structured data objects without the necessity of any collaboration. To the right is a representation from Pardalis' parent patent, "Informational object authoring and distribution system" (US Patent 6,671,696), of a granular, author-controlled, structured data object around which CPA's methods revolve.

Posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 at 6:00AM by Steve Holcombe in About Pardalis, Business Models, CPA, Granularity, Informational Objects, Intellectual Properties, RFID, Supply Chains | Post a Comment | 5 References