The International Data Spaces Information Model – An Ontology for Sovereign Exchange of Digital Content

Abstract

The International Data Spaces initiative (IDS) is building an ecosystem to facilitate data exchange in a secure, trusted, and semantically interoperable way. It aims at providing a basis for smart services and cross-company business processes, while at the same time guaranteeing data owners' sovereignty over their content. The IDS Information Model is an RDFS/OWL ontology defining the fundamental concepts for describing actors in a data space, their interactions, the resources exchanged by them, and data usage restrictions. After introducing the conceptual model and design of the ontology, we explain its implementation on top of standard ontologies as well as the process for its continuous evolution and quality assurance involving a community driven by industry and research organisations. We demonstrate tools that support generation, validation, and usage of instances of the ontology with the focus on data control and protection in a federated ecosystem.

Data Ecosystems: A New Dimension of Value Creation Using AI and Machine Learning

“…To benefit from the ecosystem means to pass one's data to the same applications. Therefore, the IDS provides vocabularies and data transformation apps so that data with the same semantics also ends up in the same format [16].…”

“…With descriptions of the basic machine learning technologies, the data science process, the platforms, and digital ecosystems in place in the preceding sections, let us now return to one of the core value propositions of modern federated data ecosystems, and in particular of the industrial data space (IDS) architecture [5] and GAIA-X [16]: Trust. While the ecosystem architecture focuses on trust in the data providers, the data consumers, brokers, and transport, here we want to focus on what it takes to make the AI applications built on top of these ecosystems trustworthy.…”

Federated Data Integration in Data Spaces

“…To advertise the data and to make it available in the IDS, they need to publish descriptions of their datasets, including technical information of their connectors (e.g., URLs and protocols to query the data), at the IDS Metadata Broker. The IDS Metadata Broker is a central component in the IDS architecture [10] that manages metadata according to the IDS Information Model [11]. The IDS Information Model uses the Web Ontology Language (OWL) to define the basic vocabulary in which data resources in the IDS can be described.…”

Multi-perspective Data Modelling in Cyber Physical Production Networks: Data, Services and Actors

“…From an information systems perspective, openness is enabled by standardized interfaces and autonomous data exchange, connecting formerly isolated companies [29]. Significant effort has been invested in creating a coherent standardised information meta model to enable the exchange of sensitive and valuable data [30,31]. In this paper, we also addressed the problem of defining proper access policies, i.e., the definition of permissions at the application level similarly to the idea of the role-based access control proposed in [20], which was inspired by the work of creating access rules according to the different actors' roles [32].…”