2.10 Federated frameworks for data sharing agreements and terms of use

IDS provides a federated data-sharing environment that poses strong requirements with regard to interoperability on each of the levels distinguished in the new European Interoperability Framework (as developed by the European Commission ); i.e., legal, organizational, semantic and technical interoperability, under an overarching integrated governance approach.

Interoperability of the legal concepts applies to both the data-sharing agreements (including legal, commercial and service-level conditions) and the terms of use (i.e., usage contracts consisting of access and usage policies). In practice, different roles and organizations are currently emerging to provide services for the administration and registration of data-sharing agreements and terms of use (under the same legal umbrella, where appropriate, and specifically for certain data-sharing communities). Within the current IDS role and interaction model, distinct roles for managing data-sharing agreements on the one hand and terms of use on the other hand have not been specified yet. Nevertheless, supporting such roles in a federated IDS environment is key to unambiguously understanding and agreement and adequately ensuring legal compliance of data-sharing transactions taking place between parties operating in different industries, countries, and/or jurisdictions. As a result of the co-operation between IDS and iSHARE, appropriate steps can be taken to address this challenge by defining the IDS approach to support federation of legal frameworks and semantic interoperability on legal conditions.