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Data Space Definition & API

Data Spaces are of course still early days, according to the European Commission “Common European data spaces will ensure that more data becomes available for use in the economy and society, while keeping companies and individuals who generate the data in control. Data is an essential resource for economic growth, competitiveness, innovation, job creation and societal progress in general ”

To be able to do that we need building blocks for those data spaces as defined in OpenDEI.eu, and clearly next to technology, governance and trust of and between participants is key. iSHARE being founded in 2015 already discovered that Trust and Governance are key items for the data economy and that only using trusted identifies is not enough for business data.

Therefore the Legal Framework and the participant registration, discovery and authorisation functionality (IAA) is developed to build on top of trusted identities. With the launch of the iSHARE Distributed Ledger in 2021 the network is now fully distributed and enables trust in data spaces, but mostly cross data space organisational interoperability.

Next to this main feature to provide discovery and validation of participants, and with that be able to communicate with parties in one or multiple data spaces. iSHARE discovered another practical issue in communicating with multiple or other data spaces : what are they really about?

So building on the work of OpenDEI.eu and taking the same principle of the iSHARE Capability Endpoint we have introduced the Data Space Endpoint in iSHARE per the launch of the DLT. In this ledger new data spaces are registered and with that there is an info endpoint per data space to point and steer new participants to the soft infrastructure of that data space. But also external data spaces to connect to yours.

The data available on the data space endpoint in the iSHARE network, from every satellite directly, is pretty straight foward;

  • Data Space ID : the unique identifier for data spaces in line with the data spaces overarching structure by the European Commission.
  • Data space Title : Name of the data space
  • Data Space Website : URL for more details on that data space
  • Country of registration : where the governing body is registered
  • Countries of operation : where the data spaces are active
  • Sectors : What sectors does a data space span
  • Tags : Specific tags to further define the details
  • But last but definitely not least the Data Space Definition URL

This last item is the key topic, because with this URL the referrals to the used standards and the full details of the data space is retrievable. Together with Team Data Spaces we’re working to further optimise and develop this standard to become an overarching standard for data spaces. The current configuration is an API with the following items covered for a data space:

  1. Data Models and Formats (per data service type, for)
  2. Data Exchange API URL(s) (for example
  3. Provenance & Traceability URL(s)
  4. Identity (what Level of Assurance is used in the trust framework)
  5. Trust (what trust framework is used, for example iSHARE)
  6. Access and usage control (what trust framework is used, for example iSHARE)
  7. Meta data and discovery (URL of the discovery service, for example iSHARE Satellite URL)
  8. Marketplace for the data space (URL of marketplace DCAT, for example AMDEX)
  9. Data Accounting service (URL of marketplace or accounting service, or participant specific)
  10. Governance URL (Where is the validation URL to verify the credentials of the participants for example iSHARE Satellite URL)

With this structure, the data spaces can make themselves known and visible to work with parties in a simple way.

More details on the the technology on https://dev.ishare.eu