WMG, University of Warwick is pleased to announce the arrival of RUMPEL, a ground-breaking hyperdata web browser that makes it simpler for people to access and use online data about themselves.

The development of RUMPEL has been led by our Professor of Marketing and Service Systems, Irene Ng, with funding from the EPSRC. The first of its kind, RUMPEL gives users the ability to browse their very own private and secure 'personal data wardrobe,' called a HAT (Hub-of-all-Things). The HAT collates data about them held on the internet such as on social media, calendars and smartphones, with the possibility of also including shopping, financial and other personal data, and allows people to now control, combine and share it in whatever way they wish.

Professor Irene Ng, says: “It's time for people to claim their data from the internet. The aim of RUMPEL is to empower users and enable them to be served by the ocean of data about them that's stored in all kinds of places online, so that it benefits them and not just the businesses and organisations that harvest it. The strapline 'Your Data, Your Way' reflects our determination to let people lead smarter lives by bringing their digital lives back under their own control.”

RUMPEL's development is part of the overall Hub-of-All-Things (HAT) initiative, a £1.2 million Research Councils UK digital economy project, involving six UK universities including WMG, University of Warwick, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Surrey and the University of the West of England - plus a host of industry partners and advisors including Dyson, Arup and GlaxoSmithKline.

Professor Ng adds: “We want to get thousands of people all over the world to experience for themselves how RUMPEL can help them make better decisions, save time and save money by exchanging personal data in a privacy-preserving manner. We hope this initial roll-out is just the first step in a process that puts people right at the heart of the internet in future.”

You can sign up to get a HAT and use RUMPEL at the HAT Foundation website.

Notes for editors:

RUMPEL has been developed by the two-year 'HARRIET' project, also known as Smart Me versus Smart Things: The Development of a Personal Resource Planning (PRP) System through Human Interactions with Data Enabled by the IoT, which began in November 2014 and is receiving total EPSRC funding of just over £385,000.

Hyperdata is data linked to other data held in other locations.

A web browser is a software application that enables users to find, interact with and display data on the World Wide Web. To date, the most popular browsers used around the world have included Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The funding for the research is led by the RCUK Digital Economy Theme, through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), in conjunction with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).