Towards a Digital Twin for Simulation of Organizational and Semantic Interoperability in IDS Ecosystems

An International Data Space (IDS) aims to support sharing sensitive data among trusted actors, enabling data owners to control how other agents could use their data, a property commonly denoted as data sovereignty. Data sharing with autonomy is increasingly essential for modern businesses to form ecosystems providing complex services to demanding clients. An IDS ecosystem requires the formation of data-sharing agreements involving different business roles. A data usage contract constitutes a central artifact to formalize this type of agreement. It can also guide actors in implementing or selecting the software components required to enforce data sovereignty. However, there are at least two critical challenges to overcome before forming data-sharing agreements in IDS. First, actors may interpret or represent data usage contracts differently, resulting in a semantic interoperability problem. Second, even assuming semantic mismatches as resolved, contract formation, in this case, would require business process alignment, which leads to an organizational interoperability problem. To address these issues, we envision a digital twin to simulate the formation of data-sharing agreements in IDS, which could support companies exploring semantic and organizational mismatches in this kind of environment. It could also help them assess the risks of adopting and implementing IDS technology. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (1) a research design based on the problem-solving perspective of Design Science; (2) a preliminary architectural model of the digital twin; and (3) a capability assessment of tools for modeling the digital twins envisioned by this research.