Dataspace Glossary
Terms and acronyms used throughout the dataspace documentation.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Agreement | An ODRL policy type binding a named assigner and assignee to usage conditions over a target asset; the outcome of contract negotiation and the input to every enforcement decision. |
| Activity Streams | The W3C vocabulary for describing activities in JSON-LD, used for the payloads delivered to and from the data plane inbox. |
| Catalogue broker | The dataspace role that enables asset discovery; realised by the federated catalogue. |
| Clearing house | The dataspace role that records evidence of exchanges; realised through negotiation history, activity logs, and decision and obligation logging rather than a dedicated component. |
| Connector | The participant-side runtime (control plane plus data plane) through which an organisation negotiates agreements and exchanges data. |
| Consumer | The role of the participant requesting and receiving data under an agreement. |
| Control plane | The connector half that manages agreements and transfer process state, but never payload data. |
| Data plane | The connector half that moves payload data, enforcing policy on every access. |
| Dataspace | A federation of independent organisations exchanging data under agreed rules without a central data custodian. |
| Dataspace app | An application component owning the data behind a dataset, registered in the app factory and invoked by the data plane to serve queries and handle activities. |
| DCAT | The W3C Data Catalogue vocabulary, version 3, used to describe datasets, distributions, and data services in the federated catalogue. |
| DID | Decentralised Identifier, the W3C identifier scheme for participants; the primary method anchors DID documents on the IOTA Rebased ledger. |
| DSP | The Dataspace Protocol, the connector-to-connector protocol for catalogue requests, contract negotiation, and transfer processes; this platform implements the 2025-1 series. |
| Duty / obligation | An ODRL rule requiring an action to be fulfilled as part of a policy; unfulfilled policy obligations cause evaluation to deny. |
| EDR | Endpoint Data Reference, the common name for the token-bearing data address a provider issues at transfer start; here it is the DSP DataAddress with the bearer token in its endpoint properties. |
| JSON-LD | JSON for Linked Data, the serialisation used for all protocol messages, catalogue entries, and policies. |
| JSONPath | An expression language for addressing values inside a JSON document, used by the dataspace ODRL profile for field-level targets and by decisions to name what they apply to. |
| JWT | JSON Web Token, the compact signed form in which verifiable credentials travel as trust payloads. |
| NFT | Non-Fungible Token, the on-ledger anchor used by the attestation packages. |
| ODRL | The W3C Open Digital Rights Language, version 2.2, the policy expression language for offers and agreements. |
| Offer | An ODRL policy type stating the conditions a provider is willing to grant over an asset, published in the catalogue without a named assignee. |
| PAP | Policy Administration Point, the component that stores and manages policies and agreements. |
| PDP | Policy Decision Point, the component that evaluates an agreement against an action, payload, and context to produce decisions. |
| PEP | Policy Enforcement Point, the component that applies decisions to payloads, removing or replacing what is not granted. |
| PID | Process identifier, the consumer or provider side identifier of a transfer process in DSP messages. |
| PIP | Policy Information Point, the component that gathers context facts from registered information sources for evaluation. |
| PMP | Policy Management Point, the component that locates candidate policies for a locator. |
| PNAP | Policy Negotiation Admin Point, the component providing negotiation history. |
| PNP | Policy Negotiation Point, the component that runs the DSP contract negotiation state machine. |
| Provider | The role of the participant offering datasets and serving the data under an agreement. |
| PXP | Policy Execution Point, the component that runs side effects (logging, automation) before and after evaluation. |
| Trust payload | The credential presented as a bearer token on every protocol call and verified into an identity plus attribute data. |
| URN | Uniform Resource Name, the location-independent identifier form (for example urn:uuid:...) used for dataset, policy, and process identifiers. |
| Usage control | Enforcing the conditions of an agreement on every access to the data, down to individual fields, rather than only at the moment of transfer. |
| VC | Verifiable Credential, the W3C model for cryptographically verifiable claims, used both as the trust payload and as the basis for attestation. |
| XACML | The OASIS eXtensible Access Control Markup Language, origin of the policy point (PAP, PDP, PEP, PIP) pattern the rights management components follow. |
| XSD | XML Schema Definition datatypes, used to type ODRL constraint operand values such as dates and integers. |