Creating a data space
After discussing how to join a data space the question is: How do you create a data space? The answer depends again on the purpose of your data space and the needs of its participants. Regardless of whether the data space is organized in a centralized, decentralized, federated or hybrid manner, common denominators and basic functionalities can be found.
A data space establishes trust within a community to share data with each other. The definition of community can be very broad. It might be a tight knit, small community of one company and its suppliers, or a large community with many participants. Some data spaces are created for a narrow use case and purpose others for many use cases that are relevant for a group of participants.
Many decisions need to be made when designing the data space, here some of the more common ones:
Is the membership closed to a small, known group or open to a larger range of participants?
Do you want a central party with additional privileges (e.g., exclusion of participants for bad behavior) or is the independence of the participants and their autonomy the most important design factor?
What level of technical maturity is expected from the participants?
What type of data is shared and for what purpose?
Answering these questions helps you make the design choices between architectures and deployment patterns of data spaces.
Once all design decisions are made, the functional elements are planned:
Rules: What behavior and skills (technical and organizational) are required?
Policies: the participation rules expressed and verified in policies
Membership certification: What mechanism is used to verify a membership?
Participant registry: Where can participants see who is participating?
Identity system: centralized or decentralized identities - control over participants
Catalog(s): one central, multiple federated or individual decentralized catalogs?
Working through the above list of mandatory functional elements will clarify the architecture pattern for the data space, which will also mandate a specific design of the data space governance authority. Now the DSGA needs to be implemented to create the data space:
Create an identity for the data space
Provide a self-description
Membership policies
Trust anchors and trust frameworks
Attributes that will help participants decide which level of trust to apply for
use of the technical components as required according to the design
Participant registry
Registration service
Provide the workflow to apply for membership
Validate whether applicants comply with membership requirements
Issue membership credentials
Revoke membership credentials
Provide a discovery mechanism for the data space (website, contact form, etc.)
Once the DSGA is instantiated, organizations can apply for membership. After a participant joins, there are two main activities that all participants are interested in: discovering data shared by others and sharing their own data in a controlled manner to ensure autonomy and agency over the data. This is the core functionality that any data space provides. Additional functions and services such as marketplaces, data escrow services, processing services and applications might be provided as optional elements.
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