Maintaining control over sensitive data in the Physical Internet: Towards an open, service oriented, network-model for infrastructural data sovereignty

Changing market dynamics force organizations evermore to share data in supply chains. Misuse of the data shared can cause major damage to the business and reputation of organizations. Hence, being in control over the terms-of-use for sharing data (i.e., data sovereignty) is a key prerequisite for sharing potentially sensitive data. This, however, provides a major challenge as data sovereignty concepts are currently mainly provided in communities with their own specific data sovereignty solutions. This faces data providers with a threat of lock-in and major integration efforts in case of data sharing with a multitude of data consumers. As alternative, a network-model approach for providing generic infrastructural data sovereignty can overcome these challenges. Its technical concepts are currently maturing. Its business and service concepts however are still under development. This paper proposes an open, service-oriented, network-model approach for infrastructural data sovereignty. The goal is to support a broad variety of end-user and service provider options for maintaining sovereignty in the data sharing processes. It uses an illustrative and representative logistics scenario and describes how infrastructural data sovereignty may stimulate adoption of sharing of (potentially sensitive) operational data as required for realizing the physical Internet.