iSHARE is a federated scheme building on the standards agreed in the data space. To assure federation of all aspects, and don’t have single points of ‘failure’ or ‘power’ in the structure, all roles are defined and can be executed by multiple parties.

In the iSHARE network there are 6 roles and the foundation that governs the network and the trust in the network. 

There are two main types of roles :
1. Those who actually interact with the data, which are called “Adhering parties” so actually using the data and adhering to the terms of use.
2. Those who enable trusted exchange and are certified by the iSHARE Foundation to execute on these roles, which are called “Certified parties”. 

The principle of a role is that its execution can be done by the same legal entity, but the interface specification assures that always level playing field / federation is possible. 

For example: A Data Owner can decide to also be Data Provider when they have their own ERP connected to the network, and even in combination can also be their own Authorization Registry. Regardless of that all API’s to the Data Provider and the AR are similarly exposed to the iSHARE network. 

So let’s look at the roles: 

The Adhering roles are: 

• Data Owner: The owner or Entitled party of the data, to be shared by Data or Service Providers.
• Data Consumer : The consumer of the Data or Service, requesting a data set from a provider through discovery at the satellite or direct.  
• Data Provider: The provider of the Data or Service, after validating with the satellite and the authorization registry. 

The Certified roles are: 

• iSHARE Satellite: The federated Scheme administrator responsible for onboarding the Adhering parties into the network of the data space. Registering participants in the iSHARE Distributed Ledger. 
• iSHARE Authorization register: The Authorization Registry, enabling the registration and sharing of data sharing policies by Data Owners. This can be both an own implementation by a Data Owner or an AR Service Provider.
• Human Identity Provider: The provider of verified personal credentials, with authorizations from and link to legal entities and EIDAS.