News & Insights

The International Data Spaces Association has announced that the iSHARE data-sharing scheme and the IDS Reference Architecture (IDS) are now aligned with respect to identification, authentication and authorization. As of today, organisations that want to obtain control over data can go live with IDS immediately through iSHARE – a scheme that facilitates the secure and simple exchange of data in business ecosystems worldwide on the basis of uniform standards. INNOPAY has been involved in the development of the data-sharing scheme right from the start. From 2016 to 2019, INNOPAY worked on behalf of the Netherlands’ Top Sector Logistics to facilitate the co-creation process and the initial adoption of iSHARE.

The announcement, which was made at the IDSA Winterdays in Paris, was accompanied by an appeal to public-sector and private-sector organisations to sign a petition to speed up the implementation of data sovereignty. 

Data sovereignty: uniform, simple and controlled data sharing

iSHARE is a set of agreements that enables organisations to give each other access to their data. Since they all work with the same identification, authentication and authorisation methods, they do not need to keep making new agreements every time they want to share data. The scheme went live in 2018, and the number of organisations that are implementing iSHARE has been growing steadily ever since.

Thanks to the incorporation of the iSHARE data-sharing agreements into the IDS architecture, IDSA will now be able to accelerate the deployment of a secure infrastructure that protects data sovereignty and trust. “Over recent months, we have worked on aligning the fundamentals of the iSHARE scheme with the IDS architecture. The IDS architecture supports different identity management mechanisms and is technology agnostic. The integration of iSHARE enables participants to quickly set to work with their use cases while relying on a proven and readily available identity solution. In other words: by including iSHARE, we can offer faster deployment,” says Lars Nagel, Managing Director of IDSA.

“In the Netherlands we already have several examples of real-life iSHARE implementations that can be a source of inspiration for the IDS community. Above all, both we and IDSA recognise the urgent need to accelerate the efforts to achieve data sovereignty in Europe. That’s why we are also seizing this opportunity to encourage public-sector and private-sector organisations throughout Europe to sign our petition. Additionally, we are calling on them to proactively contribute to giving businesses and consumers control over their own data – and iSHARE now makes that possible,” states Gerard van der Hoeven, chair of the iSHARE Foundation.  

The International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) is an international network in which businesses and research organisations are actively involved in designing a trustworthy architecture for the data economy. IDSA aims to facilitate the worldwide exchange of data between data providers and data users in business data-sharing ecosystems and in which data providers stay in control of their own data. This data sovereignty is achieved by allowing data providers to define conditions and set restrictions for the use of their data. 

Ever since its foundation in 2016, more than 100 companies and institutions from 20 countries and various industries, including several Fortune 500 companies, globally active medium-sized companies and software and system houses, have made progress in building the IDS architecture.