Data space membership

Technically the membership in a data space is just a credential. Nothing more than that. If a data space software agent can show the membership credential it acts on behalf of an organisation which is a member of the data space.

However, on the business and legal layer things can get more complicated. There the membership in a data space can be a complex set of business process that need to be followed and legal documents that need to be signed.

To be able to issue membership credentials a data space needs to define policies that specify what attributes an applicant must meet to become a trusted participant, often also referred to as a member. The data space governance authority (DSGA) manages those policies, and it defines the business processes that might be necessary for this onboarding. As policies need to be clearly understandable and interpretable the DSGA also needs to provide a semantic model that details the defined policies so that applicants can correctly interpret the policies and provide proper claims about their attributes. The referenced semantic model describes the acceptable policies, their names, the potential value, and the format in which those values are accepted.