Techniques to Improve B2B Data Governance Using FAIR Principles

• Main Authors: Cristina Georgiana Calancea, Lenuța Alboaie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Mathematics
• Subjects: B2B data governance mechanisms; methodologies to model and manage FAIR data; decentralized B2B data marketplace architecture; metadata as blockchain assets; transactions controlled semantic model; access policy based data sharing
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/9/1059

Sharing data along the economic supply/demand chain represents a catalyst to improve the performance of a digitized business sector. In this context, designing automatic mechanisms for structured data exchange, that should also ensure the proper development of B2B processes in a regulated environment, becomes a necessity. Even though the data format used for sharing can be modeled using the open methodology, we propose the use of FAIR principles to additionally offer business entities a way to define commonly agreed upon supply, access and ownership procedures. As an approach to manage the FAIR modelled metadata, we propose a series of methodologies to follow. They were integrated in a data marketplace platform, which we developed to ensure they are properly applied. For its design, we modelled a decentralized architecture based on our own blockchain mechanisms. In our proposal, each business entity can host and structure its metadata in catalog, dataset and distribution assets. In order to offer businesses full control over the data supplied through our system, we designed and implemented a sharing mechanism based on access policies defined by the business entity directly in our data marketplace platform. In the proposed approach, metadata-based assets sharing can be done between two or multiple businesses, which will be able to manually access the data in the management interface and programmatically through an authorized data point. Business specific transactions proposed to modify the semantic model are validated using our own blockchain based technologies. As a result, security and integrity of the FAIR data in the collaboration process is ensured. From an architectural point of view, the lack of a central authority to manage the vehiculated data ensures businesses have full control of the terms and conditions under which their data is used.