Nowadays, the IoT ecosystem is evolving rapidly, with multiple heterogeneous sources producing high volumes of data and processes transforming this data into meaningful or “smart” information. These volumes of data, including IoT data, need to be stored in repositories that can host raw, unprocessed, relational and non-relational types of data, such as Data Lakes. Due to the weakness of metadata management, security & access control is one of the main challenges of Big Data storage architectures as Data Lakes can be replaced without oversight of the contents. Recently, the Blockchain technology has been introduced as an effective solution to build trust between different entities, where trust is either nonexistent or unproven, and to address security and privacy concerns. In this paper we introduce DLMetaChain, an extended Data Lake metadata mechanism that consists of data from heterogeneous data sources which interact with IoT data. The extended mechanism mainly focuses on developing an architecture to ensure that the data in the Data Lake is not modified or altered by taking into advantage the capabilities of the Blockchain.

Nowadays, one of the greatest challenges in data meshes revolves around detecting and creating data domains and data products for providing the ability to adapt easily and quickly to changing business needs. This requires a disciplined approach to identify, differentiate and prioritize distinct data sources according to their content and diversity. The current paper tackles this highly complicated issue and suggests a standardized approach that integrates the concept of data blueprints with data meshes. In essence, a novel standardization framework is proposed that creates data products using a metadata semantic enrichment mechanism, the latter also offering data domain readiness and alignment. The approach is demonstrated using real-world data produced by multiple sources in a poultry meat production factory. A set of functional attributes is used to qualitatively compare the proposed approach to existing data structures utilized in storage architectures, with quite promising results. Finally, experimentation with different scenarios varying in data product complexity and granularity suggests a successful performance.

Data meshes are an approach to data architecture and organization that treats data as a product and focuses on decentralizing data ownership and access. It has recently emerged as a field that presents quite a few challenges related to data ownership, governance, security, monitoring, and observability. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an innovative algorithmic framework leveraging data blueprints to enable the dynamic creation of data meshes and data products in response to user requests, ensuring that stakeholders have access to specific portions of the data mesh as needed. Ownership and governance concerns are addressed through a unique mechanism involving Blockchain and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This facilitates the secure and transparent transfer of data ownership, with the ability to mint time-based NFTs. By combining these advancements with the fundamental tenets of data meshes, this research offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges surrounding data ownership and governance. It empowers stakeholders to navigate the complexities of data management within a decentralized architecture, ensuring a secure, efficient, and user-centric approach to data utilization. The proposed framework is demonstrated using real-world data from a poultry meat production factory.