A significant number of data sets from companies, governments, researchers, and community organizations could hold major insights, but contain personal information or intellectual property that should not be made public.
SEAL is a high security lab within Spark: a centre for social research innovation. It provides a safe place to store and access confidential data for the purposes of research. SEAL is a trusted intermediary between data owners and research users, making access from anywhere secure and seamless.
Agreement with Data Owner: A Data Sharing Agreement is developed to establish rules for data use, security, authorized access, and publication of findings. Data is then transferred from the data owner to SEAL at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario Canada.
Make Data Research Ready: If needed, SEAL fixes challenges with the data (things like missing values, mistakes, etc.) and builds a data dictionary, which is a guide to the data set.
Give Approved Researchers Access: SEAL (or the data owner) vets and approves researchers based on the Data Sharing Agreement. Those researchers sign agreements and receive access to a MobiKey.
Researchers Work "in the Lab" From Anywhere: The MobiKey temporarily takes control of the researcher's computer and directly connects them to SEAL where they have access to the data, all major analysis software, and collaboration tools.
Insights Emerge: The researcher(s) analyze the data from wherever they are. They find meaningful insights that can benefit the data owner and society broadly.
