A Service Architecture for Dataspaces

TL;DR

This paper proposes a generic service architecture for dataspaces, enabling the integration of services into existing dataspace ecosystems like Eclipse Dataspace Components, and demonstrates its practical implementation.

Contribution

It introduces an abstraction layer for services in dataspaces and provides an initial implementation compatible with the EDC Connector.

Findings

The architecture supports seamless service integration.

The implementation demonstrates practical applicability.

Enhances dataspace ecosystems with service capabilities.

Abstract

Dataspaces are designed to support sovereign, trusted and decentralized data exchange between participants forming an ecosystem. They are standardized by initiatives such as the International Data Spaces Association or Gaia-X and have gained adoption in several domains such as mobility, manufacturing, tourism or culture. In dataspaces, participants use connectors to communicate peer-to-peer. The Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC) Connector is a broadly adopted, open-source implementation that adheres to the standards and is supported by a large community. As dataspaces in general, it focuses on the exchange of data assets with associated usage policies and does not support services. In practice, however, there is demand for dataspace-based services and conceptual arguments support their inclusion in dataspaces. In this paper, we propose an abstraction layer for providing generic services within dataspaces. Adopters can use this layer to easily develop own services, seamlessly integrated with the existing dataspace technology. Besides, we present an initial implementation of this service architecture for the EDC Connector and demonstrate its practical applicability.