Eclipse Dataspace Connector becomes Eclipse Dataspace Components

[mspiekermann]

A year and a half ago, we jointly launched the Eclipse Dataspace Connector (EDC) project to advance the conceptual and technical foundation for building data spaces and to support the multitude of initiatives and projects implementing data sharing and data economy use cases. At the start of the project, user requirements were clearly focused on the exchange of data, the establishment of control mechanisms and negotiation processes of policies according to the data sovereignty concepts, and the interaction and integration of established technologies for the actual data transfer. These prior requirements were addressed by the Connector component, thus invest resources in its development was the way to go for our community.

However, after a short period of time, we realized from the many discussions with users and developers that, in addition to the Connector, there was also a lack of concepts and components with other capabilities for the practical setup of data spaces. Components that could prove themselves in practice and allow possible adaptation of different architectural decisions along specific requirements, were not available and made it difficult for projects to build their data space infrastructure and focus on data sharing use cases within their ecosystem.

For this reason, we in the community decided back at the beginning of the year to address additional components as part of the project. Starting with FederatedCatalog and IdentityHub, as well as RegistrationService, additional components were added to the framework and resulted in the development of a framework for building an entire data space, including the demonstration in the context of a MinimumViableDataspace (MVD). All these components as well as the MVD can be accessed through the project's repositories.

In agreement with the Eclipse Foundation, we are now taking the next logical step: By expanding the scope and taking a holistic view of a data space framework rather than a dedicated connector component, a rebranding was carried out.

Up from now, the project name is Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC).

Website, documentation, mailing lists and others will be updated accordingly during the next days, while published artifacts already reflect the new structure.