Case Study

Our work with Reath involved the creation of an open data standard for the purpose of facilitating industrial processes involving reusable containers.

Client

Reath

Industry

Environment

Service

Data Presentation

Location

England

About Reath

Reath’s mission statement is “to build the digital infrastructure required for businesses to shift to the circular economy. They specialise in the tagging and tracking of circular assets, and building the “digital passport” they need - think Google Analytics for the circular economy.

Our Approach

The first part of this process involved a detailed requirements gathering process. We learned about how circular economy supply chains work, the common priorities and pitfalls in such systems, and the regulatory requirements their processes are subject to. Whenever regulatory compliance is an issue in a data system, attention to detail is of the utmost importance, and we were careful to ensure that our solution would fit cleanly into both the physical and regulatory environments that it is expected to perform in.

After our requirements gathering process was complete, we began the implementation of the open data standard. One aim of the standard is to make interoperability between circular economy industrial processes easier and towards that end we decided that our standard would employ technologies whose enduring and widespread use proved their reliability has stood the test of time. Our new standard would define both a standard for data persistence in the form of a relational database schema and a standard for data transfer in the form of a REST API. The REST API would be divided into three definitions, an API that provides the main developer’s interface and access controls to the relational database defined by the standard, an API that provides logistical information about items in the process, and an API that provides statistical information about the system.

Particular attention had to be paid to environment-specific matters for example unlike traditional web applications, applications conforming to this standard sometimes operate on intranets in areas where external internet connections are not always available, and mistakes which might be simply annoying in ordinary cases could in this instance cause costly regulatory issues and are often less easily patched. As well as making sure this standard would be applicable in any of these scenarios, it was important that we not only got this standard right but that we got it right the first time.

For much of this work we were able to build upon existing technological standards. Our schema definition produced as part of this standard was written in compliance with the ISO standard for SQL which means that it can be implemented using any relational database system conforming to this standard, avoiding issues of vendor lock-in in favour of a universal and widely-implemented approach. While REST itself is an architecture style rather than a standard in its own right, our data transfer standard was careful to follow widely accepted industry best practices that all web developers are familiar with.

The Result

The result of our work was that Reath is able to add an open standard for the transfer and storage of data relevant to its pioneering work in the circular economy in a way that a diverse array of systems can easily integrate into in the future. We were very proud of this work at Data Kraken because while this was the first open data standard we have developed, it fit very well with both our eco-centric values and every developer’s desire for standardised data in a sometimes chaotic technological landscape.

We contacted the team at Data Kraken when we needed support to produce technical documentation for an Open Data Standard. We knew they would bring a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm, and appreciated the passion and dedication they had for the project. They went above-and-beyond to ensure the deliverables met the scope, and they communicated progress well throughout.

Claire Rampen, Co-founder & Managing Director

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