DUBAI // One of the biggest potential resources for the region may be data rather than oil, a conference has heard.
Tapping into “big data” can radically change the fields of health, medicine, transport and society in general, said Ansar-Ul-Haque Yasar, from the Hasselt University Transport Research Institute in Belgium.
“I think now the birth of big data is equal to the value of gold, because what you can do with it is beyond someone’s imagination.”
Mr Yasar was speaking at the Gitex technology conference at the Dubai World Trade Centre on Tuesday.
The term big data refers to sets of information that are so vast they must be analysed differently.
“It can change how people behave now and how people would behave in the near future,” said Mr Yasar.
Authorities are regarding data as the future of growth in the Middle East, said Maher Shirah, strategy excellence manager at the Roads and Transport Authority in Dubai.
“I think comparing the data to oil is not a valid comparison,” Mr Shirah said. “Maybe we can compare it to food. We’re seeing the need for data. We’re seeing how important it is.”
Data could be particularly relevant in the UAE where information such as date of birth may not always be available, said Saleem Adam, partner at Trowers and Hamlins law firm, which has offices in the UK and Middle East.
“Here, with the entrance of identity cards it’s a lot easier and the integrity of data is a lot higher,” said Mr Adam.
Another plus is that the main driver for change comes from UAE government leadership, Mr Shirah said.
But not everything can be collected by governments, which means that crowd-sourcing and partnerships with private companies are another source, said Ahmed Baig, another expert on the panel.
Data from sources such as social-media analytics could help to use information that have never been looked at before, said Mr Shirah.
“I think adapting such technologies will actually unleash some of the capabilities that exist in these organisations that they aren’t really looking at,” he said.
One issue commonly raised is privacy, but agencies can generalise the data and not look at individuals’ information, said Mr Shirah.
“We don’t say who,” he said. “You have to understand that when organisations want to do this, there’s a value behind it. There’s a service they want to improve.”
Analysts saw three waves of privacy concerns about data – an initial period of a lot of concern, then a younger generation not caring, and finally a mix of the two, said Abdulkader Lamaa, principal analyst at Strategy&.
“People are trying to balance between the services they are getting and the cost of their privacy,” Mr Lamaa said.
Data should be seen as a new source of wealth for the region if it can “create the right trust frameworks in which personal data can be safely exploited”, said Simon Torrance, member of the World Economic Forum Big Data Programme.
The Arabian Gulf has the money to invest in big data and its importance is equal here to other countries in the world, he said.
“It could lead other parts of the world by being early adopters of best practice in big data,” Mr Torrance said, giving the example of the Health Authority Abu Dhabi’s Weqaya screening programme.
It created a system where data “could be safely anonymised and used to help citizens manage their own health care”, he said.
There is an opportunity to create “slightly more subtle and sophisticated laws and regulations for the use of customer data”, he said.
“The region obviously has been made very wealthy by oil and big data is a new asset – a new oil – for the digital economy, and needs to be managed and exploited carefully to create the next wave of wealth for the region,” Mr Torrance said.
The global market in big data is expected to jump almost five-fold by 2020, analysts said.
lcarroll@thenational.ae
