A data sharing agreement framework

Abstract

When consumers build value-added services on top of data resources they do not control, they need to manage their information supply chains to ensure that their data suppliers produce and supply required data as needed. Producers also need to manage their information supply chains to ensure that their data is disseminated and protected appropriately. In this paper, we present a framework for data sharing agreements (DSA) that supports a wide variety of data sharing policies. A DSA is modeled as a set of obligation constraints expressed over a dataflow graph whose nodes are principals with local stores and whose edges are (typed) channels along which data flows. We present a specification language for DSAs in which obligations are expressed as distributed temporal logic (DTL) predicates over data resources, dataflow events, and datastore events. We illustrate the use of our framework via a case study based on a real-world data sharing agreement and discuss issues related to the analysis and compliance of agreements.