× Note: The Solar Forecast Arbiter is now under the stewardship of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). For more info, contact forecastarbiter@epri.com.

Data Policies

This page summarizes the data sharing and privacy policies of the Solar Forecast Arbiter.

An organization is an entity that owns data or obtains license to submit data to the framework. A user is an individual working for an organization that performs tasks such as submitting data to the framework and downloading data from the framework. An organization administrator is a user that has can also grant permissions to view or modify data to other users, including users outside of the administrator’s own organization.

The Data Use Agreement (DUA) is a non-negotiable legal document that all parties are bound to. The DUA must be signed by an authorized representative of an organization before its employees will be allowed to upload data, view data contributed by other users, or generate summary statistics.

The data policies can be summarized as:

  • Signing the DUA does not obligate an organization to upload data, nor does it obligate an organization to share uploaded data.
  • Organizations retain ownership of the data they upload to the framework.
  • Users upload data to the framework on behalf of organizations.
  • Organization administrators have complete control over how their organization’s data may be accessed by other users.
  • Organization administrators may delete their organization’s data from the Arbiter at any time.
  • Uploading data does not give Solar Forecast Arbiter team members the ability to study it. Sharing data with project team members follows the same procedures as sharing data with any other user.
  • All data will be securely deleted within 30 days of the termination of the project (anticipated late 2021).

The DUA describes two types of data that participants may contribute: Open Project Data and Limited Project Data. Limited Project Data is proprietary data for which access controls are required. Most of the data policies are structured around addressing concerns about Limited Project Data. Open Project Data is data that users contribute to the project’s reference data set. This data immediately benefits the whole community, but organizations lose control over who can access it.

Contributing data

Each organization contributing data to the framework retains ownership and control of its data. Each framework user is a member of an organization and contributes data on behalf of the organization.

Through the framework web interface or API calls, the user associates data with data access policies. These policies allow specific users to access to the data. The web interface shows an organization administrator a list of all of the submitted metadata/data it owns and the access roles given to other users. Please see the Data Access Control documentation for more information.

Under a forecast trial use case, anonymized time series data and/or summary statistics derived from the data are owned by the framework. This ensures trial fairness, transparency, and reproducibility. However, the framework operators are not allowed to view or disclose anonymized data or statistics unless given permission using the data sharing features of the web service.

Deleting data

An organization may delete its data from the framework at any time, or an organization may ask the framework operators to delete its data from the framework.

All non-public data will be securely deleted within 30 days of the termination of the project (anticipated late 2021).

Other

The Solar Forecast Arbiter uses national standards and best practices for security of stored data and data transmission.

Stakeholders have questioned the ability for framework operators to access user-contributed data. Accessing user-contributed data requires highly-restricted super user access on the servers. This access is restricted to the smallest number of people possible. The DUA expressly forbids the framework operators from analyzing or examining user-contributed data except when required to solve service issues.

Stakeholders have also questioned the ability for framework operators to deanonymize data contributed to anonymous forecast trials. With some study of IP logs the framework operator could potentially determine who contributed what data. This too would require highly-restricted super user access on the servers. Data contributors that want to prevent this possibility can use a VPN.