Infrastructural sovereignty over agreement and transaction data ('metadata') in an open network-model for multilateral sharing of sensitive data

Organizations are becoming ever more aware that their data is a valuable asset requiring protection against mis-use. Therefore, being in control over the usage conditions (i.e. data sovereignty) is a prerequisite for sharing sensitive data in (increasingly complex) supply chains. Maintaining sovereignty applies to both the primary shared data and to the 'metadata' stemming from the data sharing support processes. However, maintaining sovereignty over this metadata creates an area of tension. Data providers must balance operational efficiency through outsourcing the data sharing support processes and the associated metadata to external, trusted, organizations against the added risk of transferring control over the metadata. At the same time, lock-in by community providers and major integration efforts due to multiple data sharing relationships need to be avoided. To address these issues, this paper elaborates an open network-model approach for maintaining sovereignty over metadata.