The Soberana Ontology: Modeling Business Ecosystems for International Data Spaces

Data, specially those related to confidential information, plays a crucial role in contemporary organizational operations. The need to exchange information among modern entities in a multi-national context has led to the emergence of the International Data Spaces (IDS) as an option that promotes security, sovereignty, and reliability in data exchange. Enabling organizations to understand the value generated by the data and the relationships between the parties involved is a major challenge, which can be addressed through explicit business models. The objective of this research is to develop a solution to derive and formalize business models for data-sharing agreements in IDS. The Design Science Research Methodology was adopted. During the problem investigation phase, we identified the lack of explicit business models for IDS and its associated requirements. In the treatment design phase, we applied the Systematic Approach for Building Ontologies to develop the
Soberana ontology that serves as a model factory for business models in IDS. Finally, in the treatment validation phase, we used SPARQL to demonstrate how the ontology addresses the competency questions covered by the Ontology Requirements Specification Document. A practical demonstration of the use of the ontology with synthetic data resulted in the derivation of data-sharing agreement models in different ecosystem organizations present in the literature. The Soberana ontology provides a contribution to enable organizations to formulate business strategies, understand the functioning of IDS, and analyze data-sharing agreements.