Relation to other IDSA Documents

The International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) provides a comprehensive body of documentation that serves as both a strategic compass and a practical guide for building interoperable, trusted dataspaces. IDSA documents follow a clear top-down structure: starting with vision and principles, moving to governance and requirements, narrowing into thematic clarity, and concluding with technical realization. This structure ensures coherence across conceptual, operational, and technical domains, enabling organizations to confidently adopt dataspace principles at scale.

Level	Document	Purpose
Vision	Manifesto	Defines core principles and motivation
Governance	Rulebook	Establish requirements and roles
Thematic guidance	Focus topics	Explore evolving topics in depth
Technical Architecture	RAM	Enables implementations

Manifesto – The IDSA North Star

At the top of the IDSA document hierarchy stands the IDSA Manifesto, a concise yet powerful declaration of purpose. It describes IDSA’s ambition to shape a trusted global data economy founded on sovereignty, trust, and interoperability. The Manifesto serves three essential functions:

• Sets the shared aspiration: to enable data sharing ecosystems where organizations retain control over their data and use it responsibly for collective innovation.

• Establishes guiding values: trust, fairness, interoperability, and sovereignty, which frame all other IDSA documents.

• Calls for collective action: encouraging industry, research, and policymakers to collaborate toward Trusted Data Sharing based on open standards and decentralized architectures.

Unlike detailed guidance documents, the Manifesto is deliberately high level. It articulates “why” dataspaces matter and builds a shared identity and strategic direction for the IDSA community. All subsequent documents—including the Rulebook, Focus Topics, and the Reference Architecture Model (RAM)—are grounded in the principles laid out here.

Rulebook – From Principles into Practice

Guided by the ideals of the Manifesto, the IDSA Rulebook answers "WHAT" needs to be done to translate vision into concrete requirements and governance models. It supports the creation, operation, and growth of data spaces by distinguishing mandatory requirements from optional, value-adding practices. Its scope spans technical, commercial, and legal dimensions:

• Common technical guidance, including functional requirements and specifications.

• Recommendations for applying IDSA technical artefacts and for alignment with partner frameworks.

• Operational guidance for collaboration, roles, and processes that enable data space ecosystems.

• Perspectives on implementing and complying with international legal and regulatory obligations to facilitate trusted, cross-border data sharing.

The Rulebook acts as the normative foundation of IDSA. It does not specify implementation technologies but clearly defines conditions for trust—usage control, contractual assurance, and transparent operations—thus linking data value creation with accountability.

Focus Topics – Depth on Key Challenges

While the Manifesto inspires and the Rulebook governs, documents for individual focus topics dive deeper into specific adoption within dataspaces. These concise thematic modules ensure that the documentation can evolve with a fast-changing environment without overloading core documents. Current topics include:

• Identity & Trust – decentralized identity management and verifiable credentials.

• Interoperability – semantic, organizational, and technical interoperability models.

• Observability – monitoring dataspace operations while respecting sovereignty.

• Agentic AI and LLM – integration of MCP and dataspace in the context of agentic web

Each Focus Topic is anchored in the Rulebook and consistent with the Manifesto, providing reusable patterns and best practices. Their modular structure ensures efficient maintenance and allows new topics to be integrated as technology and regulation evolve.

Architecture Document – Technical Realization

While previous documents define what to implement, the Reference Architecture Models (RAMs) explain "HOW" to build it. It is the central technical compendium that transforms more abstract governance concepts into implementable architecture. The RAM introduces:

• Interaction models between logical components

• Protocol specifications like the Dataspace Protocol (DSP) and Decentralized Claims Protocol (DCP).

• Capabilities for identity, data discovery, policy enforcement, contract negotiation, and secure transfer.

• Integration patterns that support interoperability without imposing a single technology stack.

The RAM is not prescriptive software architecture; it is a design framework that accommodates diverse implementation paths. It supports system architects and developers by connecting high-level requirements from the Rulebook with concrete deployment scenarios. Its two core sections—Capability Mapping and Architectural Best Practices—make it an indispensable engineering guide for building sovereign, trusted data ecosystems.