Provenance and traceability

This topic is not covered in the iSHARE Trust Framework. The data space is free to define agreements or remove this section.

DSSC Description

This building block provides guidance to a data space which needs to support provenance, traceability, logging, audits, etcetera, in a standardised way for the use cases it supports.

Some use cases need additional data over the actual data being shared. This additional data may need the same or different access and usage management than the actual data itself.

In a data space or a particular transaction, it must be defined which information about this transaction is stored and how the access and the usage are regulated and controlled.

The evidence itself is again data, which is shared among different participants. Therefore, many concepts applied to data can also apply to this evidence, e.g., syntax and semantics of the evidence, access & usage policies on multiple levels.

Data spaces are challenged to provide general models and rules for such datasets containing evidence for data transactions. Currently, such overarching models do not exist yet.

The amount and granularity of such evidence should be reasonable and appropriate to balance between the requirements of the availability of evidence and the scalability of the solution. The advantages and disadvantages of different approaches like a centralised, a decentralised, or a distributed solution must be assessed and understood.

A solution needs to fulfil the requirements of the data space governance, legal and contractual requirements, as well as other policies requiring such evidence, and balance this with the technical requirements like resource management, scalability, consistency, availability, and others.

The requirement for observability, traceability and provenance tracking is usually found in highly regulated industries or in cases dealing with high-value data. Data being used for artificial intelligence is an example of a situation where such mechanisms can be required by law (in this case, the AI Act).

The complete description is available here.