Data governance across jurisdictions, including Indigenous data governance
Federal, provincial, Indigenous and municipal governments describe the same people and places in different ways. DSarchitek Inc. reconciles those differences in the design, not by patching them later.
The same person, described four ways
A parcel of land, a business or a family can appear in federal, provincial, municipal and First Nations records, each with its own definitions, identifiers and rules about who may see what. Systems built one jurisdiction at a time end up joined by fragile workarounds, and the gaps fall on the people the records describe.
The practice designs the shared meaning first: what each term means in each jurisdiction, where the definitions differ, and which differences must be kept rather than merged.
Indigenous data governance
Where records concern First Nations, Inuit or Métis people, communities or lands, Indigenous data governance is a starting input to the design options, not an add-on. The practice works from the OCAP® and CARE principles and UNDRIP, and designs governance so that collective authority over the data stays in place as systems grow.
What the practice does
- Ontologies, taxonomies and crosswalks between jurisdictions' definitions.
- Data sharing designs that respect each jurisdiction's legal limits.
- Governance designs for Indigenous-led organisations that keep control with the community.
Work behind it
The practice designed the ontology and taxonomy for a provincial life-event model spanning nine registries, and advises the board of an Indigenous majority-owned sovereign AI data centre program, including the restructuring that keeps Indigenous-majority control in place. The full list is on the Record page.