SUCCESS STORY
Bringing Personal Data Back Under the User's Control
A web platform developed with Microsoft Research to securely aggregate personal data from multiple external sources into a unified user experience.
Client
Microsoft Research
Services
Applied Research · Digital Platforms · Data Integration
The Challenge
Every interaction with a retailer, online service, or connected device can generate personal data. Yet much of that information remains fragmented across the organizations that collect it, making it difficult for individuals to access, understand, or use for their own benefit.
Microsoft Research's Project Bali explored a different model: a personal data ecosystem where users could securely aggregate information held across different services and regain control over their own data.
Turning that research concept into a working platform presented a significant engineering challenge. Each external source exposed data differently, with its own authentication mechanisms, APIs, structures, synchronization requirements, and constraints. The platform needed to bring those sources together securely while presenting very different kinds of personal information through one coherent experience.
The Solution
Tecknowcore collaborated with Microsoft Research to develop the web-based Bali platform and the integration architecture behind it.
Rather than treating each external source as an isolated integration, the team developed reusable mechanisms for connecting, retrieving, synchronizing, and processing heterogeneous personal data. The architecture was designed so that additional data providers could be incorporated without duplicating the integration logic for every new source.
This flexibility was particularly important because individual providers could expose fundamentally different kinds of information - from purchase histories and loyalty data to activity records - and external APIs could evolve independently of the platform. The original project requirements explicitly anticipated multiple providers and the possibility that underlying data services could change over time.
A shared data model and reusable UI components allowed those different datasets to be presented through a consistent experience, while background synchronization kept information updated after users authorized access to their external accounts.
Security and privacy remained fundamental throughout the design: connections and synchronization involved personal information from external services, making secure authentication, processing, and storage essential parts of the solution.
The Impact
The resulting platform transformed the Bali research concept into a working web experience where users could connect external accounts and access previously fragmented personal information through a single interface.
Its reusable integration architecture provided a foundation for incorporating very different data sources while keeping the platform maintainable as providers, APIs, and data structures evolved.
More importantly, the project demonstrated the central idea behind Bali in practical form: technology could give individuals greater access to and control over personal information that would otherwise remain distributed across the organizations collecting it.
Technology & Capabilities
Microsoft Azure · React · REST APIs · Data Integration · Background Synchronization · External APIs · Authentication · Secure Data Processing
