Describe the concept of the Application Plane in the functional requirements

[ssteinbuss]

How data are used after being exchanged and in preparation before being exchanged, an application layer would need to be defined in the functional layer.

[PeterKoen-MSFT]

Thinking through the details I would suggest to not use Application Plane as that again is a very difficult name for that layer.

(Data) Management Plane is a much better name for this layer, as it's already being used in telco/networking/cloud.

Here is how I would see the separation in Dataspaces:
Control Plane - Contract offering/negotiation/agreement
Data Plane - Executing the Data Sharing Agreement to provide access to data
Data Management Plane - Responsible to execute the Enterprise Wide Data Governance/Data Management Systems

To fully execute the promise of Usage Policies in a Dataspace you need all three layers. However, I clearly see the boundary of the Dataspace to the rest of the enterprise between Management Plane and Data Plane.

The control plane negotiates the usage policy, the data plane executes the contract policy and the usage policies that are executable during the data sharing process, but to provide value data needs to travel on into the various enterprise applications, thus it needs to be managed within the enterprise. And this data management plane needs to ensure that the relevant usage policies are honored. E.g. if you specify a usage policy that says "for research purpose only, may not be used for procurement" then it's up to the management plane to ensure that this data is never forwarded to procurement or included in data lakes where procurement data is processed. If there is a usage policy that says that data needs to be deleted after 7 days, it's the data management plane that needs to keep track where within the enterprise the data is being used how and ensure the removal from those upstream applications.

On the other side, before data can be shared the data management plane is responsible for things like classification of data, defining protection worthiness, which usage policies need to be negotiated before it can be shared, but also technical provisioning like packaging the data and making it available to subsystems from which it then can be shared into the dataspace.

[ssteinbuss]

see also #58

[mspiekermann]

We should focus to describe and clarify the interfaces between control plane, data plane, and management plane. As systems might implement all three in one service, it is for the (first time) reader hard to see the borders between the three planes.

We need to carefully select examples that best show these interfaces or at least make very clear in the text that when it comes to the implementation it is not always black and white and one can't (always) say this service is a control plane, this a data plane and this service is a management plane.

Back then, in some Hackathon session(s), I remember that we also named it service plane. I like this term and it makes sense for me, as each service is responsible to act compliant to the contracts. There might not be the management plane implementation.

[PeterKoen-MSFT]

and another source of confusion that fits into the same model of explanation is what you could call an "application plane".

E.g. If a farmer wants to interact with data from a dataspace, it does so through an application from a service provider, that application uses the data management layer of the provider to service the data to the end-user (farmer), but at that point the end-user is no longer the actor that needs to be credentialed and impersonated by software components, just the meta-data information of who is being served.

This will also greatly help to resolve the never-ending discussion of the role of natural persons/end-users in dataspaces.

[github-actions]

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[mspiekermann]

@ssteinbuss @PeterKoen-MSFT as you are listed as assignee here: What was the status here? Did we conclude to put this into a separate document about the "plane structure in dataspaces"?

[PeterKoen-MSFT]

the document addressing this issue will be created in the new structure of the Rulebook. ETA tbd.
I'll leave this issue open until we have that document.