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Technical building blocks — introduction#

Part of the LDT Governance and Trust Framework — instantiates the iSHARE Data Space Template page Technical Building Blocks → Introduction (© iSHARE Foundation, see Legal notices).

Purpose#

Governance and legal agreements do not run themselves; the technical building blocks are the capabilities that make them operate. Their job, per the template, is narrow and useful: help a data space identify what it needs, point at existing standards and proven solutions, and make reuse and interconnection possible instead of reinvention.

iSHARE groups the capabilities into the DSSC's three pillars:

  1. Data interoperability — how data is described, formatted and exchanged, plus provenance and traceability where evidence is needed.
  2. Data sovereignty & trust — reliably identifying participants and their assets, and granting the right level of access and usage control.
  3. Data value creation enablers — describing, publishing and discovering data, services and offerings so participants can build use cases.

LDT instantiation — the standing rule#

For the LDT the technical pillar is mostly a selection exercise, not a design exercise. Two constraints set by the project bind every block below:

  • Reuse before build. The identity, trust and policy layer is the iSHARE (DataRights) Trust Framework 3.x with its open-source components; the twin and geospatial layer reuses the sites' existing stacks. A block that proposes something new must say what it could not reuse and why.
  • No vendor lock-in. The funder's recommendation on the ESRI stack generalises to a scheme rule: every interconnection must remain portable — an open, documented interface, so a site can be replaced without renegotiating the scheme.

Where a technical choice has a governance consequence (a role, a registry entry, an enforcement point), the block page must name it, because that is what PD4 has to describe.

PD4 mapping#

Feeds PD4 chapters 4, 5 and 7. Architecture itself is PD3; this pillar records only the rules and conditions, and cross-references PD3 rather than repeating it.