Towards a National Data Infrastructure: Plug-and-Play Collaboration at Scale
By Chris Lees
In a world defined by complexity, collaboration is not a luxury—it’s an imperative. But collaboration today is often hamstrung by data locked within organizational silos, incompatible systems, and high-cost, bespoke technical integrations. It’s time to change that. It’s time we build the data infrastructure we need.
What is Data Infrastructure?
Think of data infrastructure not as servers and storage—but as the protocols, systems, and services that transcend organizational boundaries. It’s the connective tissue that allows companies, governments, and institutions to share, discover, trust, and use data—reliably, securely, and with purpose.
Much like the ISO OSI model did for networking—encapsulating complexity through standardised layers and protocols—we now need an equivalent for data sharing at the business level. An infrastructure where data exchange becomes plug-and-play, not pain-and-pay.
From Point-to-Point to Plug-and-Play
In today’s vision of a mature data infrastructure:
- Systems are decoupled from semantics. Data sharing is system-agnostic and resilient to technological variability. What matters is context, not arbitrary preferences or vendor constraints.
- Machines do the heavy lifting. They discover, retrieve, validate, and align data automatically—understanding requirements and testing data quality with minimal human input.
- Governance is built-in. Authenticity, origin, and permitted use are verifiable and traceable—enabled by proven technologies like PKI, OpenID4VCI, and verifiable credentials.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s an assembly of existing capabilities, applied in a coordinated and purposeful way. It builds on the OSI stack by introducing new layers—managing semantics, purpose, permitted use, trust, and quality.
A Call to Action
We are at a tipping point. The built environment—where I focus much of my work—is a prime candidate for this shift. But the opportunity is broader: cross-sector, cross-border, and cross-discipline.
We need governments, standards bodies, leading trade associations, and regulators to align—to move beyond talk of interoperability and actually deliver it through coordinated infrastructure development.
Through initiatives like nima’s (https://wearenima.im) Project Indigo, and building on the thought leadership of people like Mark Enzer, the foundation is already being laid. Let’s not waste the momentum.
This is how we make collaboration faster, safer, cheaper—and smarter. This is the next chapter in information management.
All aboard.
