On latent data

I came across a post by EwanD from Microsoft entitled: “Latent Data” – the secret sauce of the Internet of Things. Since I am interested in both secret sauces and IoT, I was curious to understand what is this sauce. 

It seems that the term latent data refers to data that is typically not available, and also data that does not have any meaning on its own, and need to be aggregated, or joined with other data to be useful.  

Indeed IoT brings to the picture a lot of data that has not been available previously, and in my terminology, much of this data is about event that occur.   Sometimes the raw events are of interest, sometimes the interest is on derived events that are aggregation, transformation, or function that involve multiple events, and possibly also historical data and state information.   Note that when latent data becomes available it is not latent anymore,  and also that latent is a relative term, some piece of data can be available to somebody, and concealed from somebody else.     From this post one can learn what Microsoft sees its role in the IoT era, what I understood is that the role is twofold: both provider of OS for embedded systems, and as a cloud provider.   I am now trying to understand roles of different players in the IoT world, looking for sponsors for my recent activity.