Enhancing Trust in Inter-Organisational Data Sharing: Levels of Assurance for Data Trustworthiness
Florian Zimmer, Janosch Haber, Mayuko Kaneko
TL;DR
This paper tackles the gap in consumer-focused trust for inter-organisational data sharing by introducing Data LoA—Levels of Assurance for Data Trustworthiness. Using a objective-centered design science research approach, it synthesizes existing data trustworthiness literature to identify core design objectives and crafts an abstract Data LoA artifact with three actors: Data Consumer, Data Provider, and Assurance Provider. A proof-of-concept in a data-space environment demonstrates how Data LoA can improve transparency and support risk-aware data usage decisions, though concrete assurance levels and full interoperability remain for future work. The work contributes design knowledge and a foundational artifact intended to guide further cycles of development toward interoperable, data-centric trust mechanisms in data-sharing ecosystems.
Abstract
As data is increasingly acknowledged as a highly valuable asset, much effort has been put into investigating inter-organisational data sharing, aiming at utilising the value of formerly unused data. Moreover, most researchers agree, that trust between actors is key for successful data sharing activities. However, existing research oftentimes focus on trust from a data provider perspective. Therefore, our work highlights the unbalanced view of trust, addressing it from a data consumer perspective. More specifically, our aim is to investigate trust enhancing measures on a data level, that is data trustworthiness. We found, that existing data trustworthiness enhancing solutions do not meet the requirements of the domain of inter-organisational data sharing. Therefore, our study addresses this gap. Conducting a rigorous design science research approach, this work proposes a new Levels of Assurance for Data Trustworthiness artifact. Built on existing artifacts, we demonstrate, how it addresses the identified challenges within the domain appropriately. We found that our novel approach requires more work to be suitable for adoption. Still, we are confident that our solution can increase consumer trust. We conclude by contributing to the body of design knowledge and emphasise the need for more attention to be put into consumer trust.