XFSC: A Catalogue of Trustable Semantic Metadata for Data Services and Providers

TL;DR

This paper introduces the XFSC Catalogue, a trustable metadata management system for data services that ensures cryptographic integrity, semantic conformance, and scalable discovery within federated dataspace architectures.

Contribution

It presents a novel implementation of a trustable metadata catalogue with lifecycle management, cryptographic validation, and semantic schema conformance, applicable to federated cloud services.

Findings

Scalable to large metadata records

Ensures cryptographic integrity of VPs

Integrates with existing data connectors

Abstract

In dataspaces, federation services facilitate key functions such as enabling participating organizations to establish mutual trust and assisting them in discovering data and services available for consumption. Discovery is enabled by a catalogue, where participants publish metadata describing themselves and their data and service offerings as Verifiable Presentations (VPs), such that other participants may query them. This paper presents the Eclipse Cross Federation Services Components (XFSC) Catalogue, which originated as a catalogue reference implementation for the Gaia-X federated cloud service architecture but is also generally applicable to metadata required to be trustable. This implementation provides basic lifecycle management for DCAT-style metadata records and schemas. It validates submitted VPs for their cryptographic integrity and trustability, and for their conformance to an extensible collection of semantic schemas. The claims in the latest versions of valid VP submissions are extracted into a searchable graph database. The implementation scales to large numbers of records and is secure by design. Filling the catalogue with content in a maintainable way requires bindings towards where data and service offerings are coming from: connectors that expose resources hosted in an organization's IT infrastructure towards the dataspace. We demonstrate the integration of our catalogue with the widely used Eclipse Dataspace Components Connector, enabling real-world use cases of the German Culture Dataspace. In addition, we discuss potential extensions and upcoming integrations of the catalogue.