Architectural Considerations for a Data Access Marketplace Based upon API Management

Abstract

Data and access to data are becoming more and more a product or service to be sold. In order to deal with data access, this paper presents a marketplace for trading data. Within the marketplace, producers can present their offerings for data access and algorithms, whereas consumers are able to browse through the offerings, to subscribe to corresponding services, and to use them after being approved. As a specific property, the presented approach allows to control data access at a fine-granular level. This supports use cases where different consumers should see different portions of data according to subscribed price models and/or Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The approach takes benefit from API management, particularly the tool WSO2. The paper discusses possible architectures to combine API Management with user-specific filtering and control of SLAs, and illustrates in detail how the features of WSO2 help ease implementation and reduce effort on the one hand. On the other hand, the paper elaborates upon several technical challenges to overcome.