According to the announcement, the objective of LEADS is “to build a decentralized Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) framework that runs on an elastic collection of micro-clouds. LEADS will provide a means to gather, store and query publicly available data, as well as process this data in real-time. In addition, the public data can be enriched with private data maintained on behalf of a client, and the processing of the real-time data can be augmented with historical versions of the public and private data.”

Additionally, the LEADS project will be geared toward providing privacy, security, energy-efficiency, availability, elastic scalability, and performance.

The LEADS consortium is composed of universities and research centers (Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Technische Universität Dresden; and Telecommunication Systems Institute, Greece), whose members have proved to be able to push new ideas rapidly and effectively to the scientific community. Corporate members of the consortium include Barcelona Media, Red Hat, AoTerra, and Adidas. According to the announcement, Red Hat plans to be the lead for turning LEADS technologies or specifications into standards to help prevent vendor lock-in.