A Data Connector Store for International Data Spaces

The International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) has promoted the idea of International Data Spaces as a place for companies to share data with trust and security enforced by software and organizational competence. There has been considerable progress in delivering corporate guidelines, technical specifi- cations, and software components available for testing and deploying applications to support IDS-based ecosystems, such as the IDS data connectors classified by the Fraunhofer Institute. However, full implementation of IDS applications seems still complex and expensive for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). A possible strategy to deal with such an issue is to break the IDSA specification’s complexity into smaller pieces and build small IDS ecosystems formed by its core business roles (e.g., data owners, users, and broker service providers). In this context, this paper addresses the problem of designing an application to support the broker service provider’s role in operating in an IDS-based ecosystem. This research, therefore, follows a Design Science approach in a three-step process. First, it investigates problems of practical relevance elicited from the IDSA guidelines in combination with requirements provided by representatives of the Dutch Logistics sector. Second, it gives design to tackle the problem by combining Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Enterprise Architecture modeling artifacts. Last, it validates the architecture of the broker service provider’s application by demonstrating its technical feasibility, innovation, and software integration.