Evolving Data Space Technologies: Lessons Learned from an IDS Connector Reference Implementation

The establishment of sovereign data spaces is a cutting-edge topic in industrial data sharing scenarios. For instance, organizations like the International Data Spaces (IDS) Association and the Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud design standards for sovereign data exchanges and involved governance structures. As an implementation of these standards, data space technologies are of central importance for ensuring secure and sovereign processes and thus establishing trust between data space participants. In this paper, we present our approach, an IDS Connector reference implementation, to integrate data sharing and processing systems into data spaces by providing identity and data management, secure communication protocols, easy-to-use digital contract administration, and prototypical data usage control enforcement. After presenting the software architecture and design, we outline the successful application in selected use cases and derive lessons learned for further developments of data space technologies.