To generate value out of data sharing among participants is the ultimate objective of the data space. One option to get this value is when data products are traded and monetized by using marketplace capabilities, and the usage of those products is accounted. Building a trading relationship between a provider and a receiver or user is facilitated by the data space offering publication services to the provider, and discovery services to the potential users. To such publication services, data providers need to publish descriptions of their data and service offerings in a language of which users can make sense and whose processing can be automated.

Goal

The goal of a data-driven business-ecosystem is to create value out of data based on sharing and usage of data. Creating value out of data follows the steps to [1]:

• Describe data, services and offerings in an interoperable manner;

• To include data -and service publication services to discover offerings, so that Providers and Users can connect;

• To realize value–adding services such as marketplaces for monetization of data and services.

• To account the usage of the data and services to track the overall trading process

The Data Value Creation category is one of the three DSSC categories of technical building blocks (in addition to Data Interoperability and Data Sovereignty & Trust). It addresses the above mentioned goals of data-driven business-ecosystems in three separate building blocks. These building blocks are described below.

Building Blocks

The Data Value Creation Category comprises the following three building blocks:

• Data, Services and Offerings Descriptions: providers of data and data-driven services need to describe them, such that they become – with the help of Publication and Discovery Services as explained below – findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). A self-description of a data or service offering consists of machine-comprehensible, structured metadata, which cover the content and context of the data, the concepts addressed, the community of trust around the data, communication about the data, and the commodity nature of the data.

• Publication and Discovery Services enable the participants who provide data resources and data-driven services to publish descriptions of their resources and resource offerings, such that they become discoverable for future, potential consumers. Technically, this is enable via a central catalogue or a network of decentral catalogues, which manage self-descriptions of data and service offerings over their lifecycle.

• Marketplaces & Usage Accounting: the generation of value out of sharing data materializes through marketplace capabilities, which, as an extension of Publication and Discovery Services, provide functionality for procurement, monetization, contract lifecycle management, logging, usage accounting, billing, payment, aftersales, etc. In addition to data product providers and their users, i.e., potential consumers, a marketplace involves as stakeholders a governance body, infrastructure operator and marketplace provider.

Interrelationships

Within the category, the Data, Services and Offerings descriptions BB describe the elements that will be published in the catalogue and later on discovered through the Publication and Discovery BB. The Marketplaces and Usage Accounting relies on the service catalogue implemented in the Publication and Discovery Services building block, since marketplace functionalities will be built on top of the catalog ones, comprising Data Specifications and Data Product Offerings from multiple Providers, and based on that will perform the actions needed to allow the monetization of those data products. This building block will also provide advanced functionalities (not considered in the other block) to manage the existing catalogues (searching, filtering, etc …) from the different marketplaces.

The BBs of this category are also very much related to the Business Models BB, as they will be providing the digital mechanisms to implement the business models defined in that BB. The metadata used by the Data, Services and Offerings descriptions BB will be following the vocabularies and models proposed by the Data Models & Formats BB.

Future outlook

A list of open challenges or research questions related to the building block. This could include any high-level technical or conceptual challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve the building block's main functions, or any research questions that need to be explored further.

• Dependance of some BBs in this category (or some functionalities, e. g. marketplace) on the architecture or topology of the data space (centralized, distributed, hybrid, federated, etc …). Different topologies or archetypes will have to be considered for a fully definition of these BBs.

• Technical specifications of “marketplaces” could depend on the functionalities or specs of infrastructures providers (cloud, edge,…) mostly in the cases where the marketplaces rely on specific IaaS. Are we also considering HPC?

• This building block is just focused on the creation of value through data trading and monetization. Other ways of getting value should be considered, aligned with what is defined in the business BB.

References

[1] DSBA Technical Convergence v2: https://data-spaces-business-alliance.eu/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/Data-Spaces-Business-Alliance-Technical-Convergence-V2.pdf