WFDU-net: A workflow notation for sovereign data exchange

Abstract

Data is the main driver of the digital economy. Accordingly, companies are interested in maintaining technical control over the usage of their data at any given time. The International Data Spaces initiative addresses exactly this aspect of data sovereignty with usage control enforcement. In this paper, we introduce the so-called Workflow with Data and Usage control network (WFDU-net) model. The data consumer can visually define his or her workflow using the WFDU-net model and annotate the data operations and context. With model checking we validate that the WFDU-net follows the usage policies defined by the data owner. Afterwards, the compliant WFDU-net can be executed by exporting the WFDU-net in a Petri Net Markup Language (PNML). We evaluated our approach by using our example WFDU-net in a data analytics use case.