Who is it for?
Reading time: 12 minAxone is often described as a protocol that enables sharing Anything as a Service under any Conditions. To illustrate the infinite possibilities opened up by the protocol, this section provides further examples of the intended audience for the protocol.
For Data Providers
Data Providers reference datasets within the protocol. They are responsible for describing dataset characteristics (metadata) and establishing access conditions for the use of this resource. They interact with the protocol via dedicated smart contracts to register datasets, define their access conditions and metadata, and make the dataset available and accessible.
With the implementation of dataset access conditions, Data Providers gain the ability to define how they wish their resources to be utilized precisely. This includes specifying whether a business model is associated with the dataset, determining the privacy status of the data, and elucidating any other rights or licenses linked to the dataset. These rules empower Data Providers to intricately shape the terms under which their valuable resources are accessed, fostering transparency and control over their datasets' usage and potential monetization.
Data Providers, who are they?
Data Scientists: As innovation engines, Data Scientists play a crucial role in providing enriched and qualified data. Their expertise opens up diverse opportunities across various sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, commerce, transportation, industry, etc. A concrete example could be a Data Scientist in the healthcare domain sharing anonymized datasets related to medical diagnostics. Axone represents a new frontier, ensuring sovereignty over datasets. This creates a significant opportunity for collaboration and value creation while preserving the intellectual property of data, providing fair compensation and traceability of usage.
Individuals: Individuals are becoming active contributors by sharing any kind of datasets. It can be data they collected and curated or even personal data, including shopping habits, internet navigation, location, and health data. For instance, individuals might voluntarily share geolocation data to contribute to environmental analyses. Axone provides an infrastructure for sharing and valuing this data while ensuring that access conditions established by the provider are respected (compensation, confidentiality, protection of individual rights). Unlike Data Scientists, individuals may require intuitive no-code interfaces, and Axone, along with projects building applications on the protocol, will provide the necessary tools to make the user experience accessible.
Sensors: Acting as permanent sources of streaming data inflows, sensors provide real-time information in various domains such as environmental monitoring, logistics, and connected health, enriching predictive analytics. As a decentralized identity (DID) within the protocol, Sensors can provide data according to defined rules.
Protocols, dApps, and nodes: Decentralized protocols and dApps generate massive amounts of raw data. An example could be a DeFi protocol sharing raw data for in-depth analyses of decentralized financial activities. Axone enables these actors to make their data more easily accessible and exploitable, facilitating in-depth analyses of user behavior, smart contracts, or others.
NGO: Non-profit organizations can share data on social, environmental, and health topics, catalyzing research and social action initiatives. Making such data available for a wide range of use cases.
Companies: Motivated by collaborations or valorizing their data, companies find a flexible framework in Axone. They can compose designs that meet their needs for permissions and robust data processing, especially for sensitive data.
While not exhaustive, this classification highlights the diversity of actors participating in data sharing. Generating future knowledge requires various skills and multidisciplinary analyses, emphasizing the importance of diverse data sources. Each professional, individual, or organizational category contributes to building a robust, ethical, and innovation-friendly decentralized data ecosystem globally.
For Service Providers
Service Providers represent another essential component within the Axone ecosystem, crucial in providing and managing digital services. They offer services such as algorithms, software, storage systems, or any other digital item requiring processing time.
Depending on access conditions and Zone rules, Service Providers may be required to lock tokens on services to ensure service availability and integrity. This stake incentivizes Service Providers to guarantee off-chain service execution when invoked and can be slashed if the service level is not respected.
Service Providers interact with the protocol by referencing their services and access conditions via smart contracts, ensuring the availability and functioning of their service by on-chain registered specifications.
Service providers: Who are they?
AI Builders: AI builders, encompassing both algorithm and AI developers, play an indispensable role within the Axone ecosystem, contributing diverse machine learning solutions. These builders can provide a multitude of models, including foundation models, generative models, or more specialized ones such as text-to-speech and voice recognition. The degree of pre-training in these models can be adjusted based on consumers' needs, making them adaptable for various purposes, including additional training, fine-tuning, and inference.
Software, BI and data-driven devs: These providers are crucial in delivering data processing services. These providers enable more efficient and precise data processing by offering comprehensive solutions for handling, analyzing, and transforming data, extracting valuable insights and knowledge. This diverse array of services encompasses real-time data processing solutions, indexing services, data cleaning services, and data integration services, to name a few. These services contribute not only to the effective management of data but also to the extraction of meaningful information and the creation of value.
Infrastructure Providers: Infrastructure providers operate in the domains of computation, storage, and service orchestration, to name a few, supplying essential technological building blocks crucial for workflow realization. As an agnostic and interoperable protocol, Axone facilitates the connection to any infrastructure solution, be it cloud storage options, self-hosted cloud storage, centralized computation, proprietary computational resources, or decentralized options. This flexibility applies to both individuals and major cloud service providers.
Third-party identity service: This is a critical infrastructure component for Axone's proper functioning, assigning a DID (Decentralized Identity) to each resource within the Axone network. This approach enables composability with most identification infrastructures, notably adhering to W3C standards. This feature ensures efficient identity management, enhancing security and traceability within the Axone network.
Other Protocols: Any off-chain resources provided by a decentralized blockchain or app can be made available through Axone as long as the adapted connector exists. Synergies can go beyond referencing off-chain datasets or services, though. As mentioned in the "Protocol Concept - Interoperability" section, by leveraging the cosmos stack, Axone can seamlessly integrate other blockchains, such as Akash or Jackal, with maximum security and minimized trust through IBC by leveraging the Cosmos stack. By multiplying decentralized service offerings, Axone empowers users to compose their workflows with granularity based on their specific needs.
These are just a few examples of essential service providers crucial to properly functioning the protocol, aiming to broaden your understanding of the spectrum of possibilities. Nevertheless, it's necessary to grasp that with the impressive development of AI models, some of the technical components used today will be entirely disrupted by what will be developed tomorrow. The Open Knowledge Protocol is designed to guide providers through this transition, opening up new opportunities in the knowledge economy.
For Consumers
Consumers initiate workflows on shared resources from providers to access or generate knowledge. They can consume simple workflows, like downloading a dataset, or more intricate processes involving interactions with tens or hundreds of datasets and services.
Consumers interact with the protocol by initiating on-chain transactions invoking smart contracts to request workflow execution. They must pay the fees and rewards required to start the workflow execution.
Consumers: Who are they?
Similar to providers, consumers encompass a variety of entities, such as individuals, companies, AI agents, NGOs, etc...
One of the primary benefits for consumers lies in gaining access to a broader array of resources. As providers can set the conditions for resource access, they are incentivized to showcase their resources, presenting a more diversified range of options and solutions for consumers. Consumers leverage the output of workflows in various ways depending on their objectives.
Here are some examples to help you understand who they are and why they use Axone:
Companies
Generally, companies will leverage Axone either to create and feed an application they will make available to their clients or to harness the generated knowledge for their own use.
A company aiming to harness Dataverse resources to craft its own XaaS:
Let's take a financial analysis company that seeks to create its application by leveraging the Dataverse's resources, creating an advanced financial service accessible through a front-end. Workflows can aggregate data from diverse providers, process them according to specific needs, and deliver a personalized XaaS service. A few examples of potential applications:
- Data aggregation Application
- Business Intelligence (BI) application
- In-depth financial analysis application
- Predictive modeling services
- Monitoring and alerting Tool
Another example is a company that aims to create a mobile health application tailored for individuals. By thoughtfully orchestrating relevant resources and services from Dataverse, the company can configure the application to execute workflows prioritizing data privacy. It ranges from a large broad of applications:
- Personal Health Monitoring
- Medical Appointment Management
- Wellness Data Analysis
- Personalized Health Advice
- Secure Information Sharing with Healthcare Professionals
A company aiming to harness Dataverse resources to feed its own infrastructure or knowledge base:
Most technology companies seek to modernize their IT infrastructure, transitioning from a monolithic architecture to a more modular, service-oriented approach. Leveraging Axone allows for gradually decomposing existing features into microservices, ensuring confident utilization of shared resources. This optimization enhances operational efficiency, simplifies maintenance, and enables swift adaptation to market changes within a trust-minimized environment using Axone.
Another example is an agricultural company aiming to expand its knowledge base to optimize farming practices, improve crop yields, and stay abreast of agricultural innovations. By harnessing Dataverse resources, this company can employ tailored workflows to gather diverse datasets related to soil composition, weather patterns, crop diseases, pest management strategies, and agricultural market trends. These datasets can be processed, analyzed, and integrated into the company's knowledge base. For instance, the company might use Axone to aggregate soil quality data from various sources, analyze historical weather patterns to predict future climate trends and identify effective pest management techniques based on data-driven insights. Additionally, the company can integrate market trend data to make informed decisions about crop selection, pricing strategies, and market demand.
AI Agents
AI agents, sophisticated software entities powered with artificial intelligence, autonomously execute tasks or services, driven by knowledge of user goals. They constantly learn through machine learning and personalize interactions, adapting behaviors based on the context.
AI agents don't just interpret data, they actively contribute to complex decision-making. As a decentralized coordinator, Axone sees AI agents not just as digital services but as full-fledged actors. This perspective acknowledges that AI agents go beyond being passive services and instead play an active role in influencing and participating in decision-making processes.
Here are a few examples illustrating the versatility and practical applications of Axone for AI agent as a consumer:
AI Agent Enhancing Database through Dataset Scrutiny: An AI agent, seamlessly integrated into a market analysis platform, utilizes workflows within Dataverse to extract, analyze, and enrich a database. For instance, it can extract pertinent market trends from diverse datasets, significantly enhancing the quality and depth of available analyses.
Security Monitoring with On-Chain Data: An AI agent specialized in security monitoring engages with on-chain data to analyze a dApp or a blockchain. Within a security framework, this AI agent leverages workflows to scrutinize on-chain transactions and events, identifying potential security threats and vulnerabilities.
Real-time Data Interpretation with Streaming Data Analysis: As a consumer on Axone, the AI agent harnesses data from diverse streaming sources, enabling real-time interpretation with accurate and up-to-date information. This ensures effective, traceable, and trust-minimized monitoring.
AI Agent for Forecasting Across Domains: In various domains, such as weather, finance, and supply-chain prediction, the AI agent leverages Axone to access a variety of datasets. The agent efficiently performs forecasting tasks using the protocol, delivering valuable insights and predictions. This adaptability ensures efficiency in forecasting across different fields.
Other consumers and sum-up
Although we have explored only two types of entities, this framework seamlessly extends to various entities. While the core function of workflows remains consistent, the diversity of objectives becomes apparent. Whether profit-driven companies, NGOs striving for social impact, or individuals contributing voluntarily, the protocol's adaptability fosters collaboration across a spectrum of goals. Axone functions as an orchestration layer where the same fundamental work is tailored to meet varied objectives, from financial gain to free and open contributions, all within this dynamic digital collaboration space.
Same entities but different roles
In exploring the various actors within the protocol, we observe that most are both providers and consumers.
The nuanced nature of Axone blurs the traditional boundaries between these roles. Entities seamlessly transition between these roles based on their context and specific objectives. As a protocol, Axone directly addresses builders and exploiters of digital resources, fostering a collaborative environment where each participant, specialized and competent in their domain, adds value to creating new knowledge.
It is not uncommon to witness entities functioning as providers in specific scenarios while assuming the role of consumers in others. This fluidity underscores the adaptability and versatility inherent in Axone. As we navigate this decentralized digital landscape, Axone emerges as a facilitator, providing a framework for a myriad of actors to engage, collaborate, and collectively contribute to generating innovative knowledge.