Peer-to-peer data exchange, data marketplaces, digital ecosystems. These are different approaches to data sharing. What they have in common is that they all need secure technologies and usage policies that govern and enforce data usage control. The IDS initiative is not simply fulfilling this need but it is going even further: it provides a technological standard and a universal legal framework to create data-driven business ecosystems where data can be exchanged securely and in a standardized way, without losing control of one’s data.
Technical, Operational, and Legal Agreements
The key requirement to make all this a reality is to have a set of rules and policies governing it in a decentralized way. It is straightforward that the ecosystem could not function without clear administrative processes, managing for example the admission and certification of new participants. Neither could it work without maintenance processes like change-management procedures, which make sure that the ecosystem is resilient and adapts to future situations.
All these rules and policies are contained in the Rule Book, one of the big goals that the Launch Coalition is currently working on. The Launching coalition is a group of IDSA members aiming to cooperatively make IDS a reality and achieve IDS-based commercial solutions until September.
The Rule Book is, therefore, an essential document in addition to the IDS RAM, which describes all the technical, operational, and legal agreements to enable the IDS ecosystem to be fully working in a real-world scenario. For this reason, the Rule Book is strictly bound to the tangible implementation of the first IDS-based digital ecosystem.
First Point of Contact for All IDS Ecosystems
It is important to note that this first implementation will be a blueprint and it will not limit nor force the upcoming participants to stick to that specific ecosystem. The IDS initiative acts, indeed, as a provider of infrastructure for data sharing ecosystems to facilitate the standardization and control mechanisms. What we should therefore imagine is not a single IDS ecosystem, but multiple IDS-based digital ecosystems, not a single and central certification body but a federation of certification bodies, and so on. In this scenario, the Rule Book will represent the first point of contact for the implementation, governance, and operational activities of all these IDS ecosystems.
The target groups of this document span from developers to managers and lawyers and belong to the whole variety of participants in the ecosystem: the essential-service providers, the data-user companies, and the data-provider companies.
