Clearing House

The Clearing House is a service for logging data exchange transactions within the International Data Spaces. Based on the interactions between data providers and consumers recorded by the Clearing House, billable data usage is forwarded for settlement and quid pro quo transactions between participants are offset. The Clearing House is a generic, cross-domain service that receives information about transactions, participants and references to any existing legal contracts, stores this information in an non-reputable, verifiable form, and makes it available to the participants.

This generic Clearing House service can be used as a back end to create logging services for concrete applications.

In order to structure data and metadata according to standards that are known as widely as possible, the operator of a connector can use semantic vocabularies (also called schemas or ontologies). An operator of a connector can reuse existing vocabularies, create new own vocabularies or work with other operators on new vocabularies provided via vocabulary hubs.  Vocabulary hubs are central servers that store and publish vocabularies and also facilitate their shared preparation and further development. Such collaboration can encompass searching, selecting, reconciling, updating, change requests, version management deleting, and the identification of duplicates and unused vocabulary. Vocabulary hubs require administration.