Achieving trust and compliance in dataspaces
In today's digital landscape, businesses hesitate to share data due to concerns over transparency, security, and compliance. The mobility sector faces similar challenges—fragmented data systems, lack of trust, and complex identity verification slow down customer onboarding. These inefficiencies lead to delays, poor user experience, and ultimately impact customer retention and service adoption.
For dataspaces to thrive, businesses must trust who they are sharing data with and be assured that their partners meet compliance standards. Without a structured approach to data verification and trust, large-scale collaboration within mobility ecosystems remains difficult.
Validating trust: A proof of concept in the Mobility Data Space
The Mobility Data Space is one of Europe’s first productive data ecosystems, enabling innovative mobility solutions and data monetization. As the ecosystem expands from a small group of trusted partners to a large-scale network, ensuring all members are legitimate, compliant, and properly verified is critical for maintaining trust and security.
To address this, T-Systems and MDS collaborated on a Proof of Concept (PoC) to integrate trust services without disrupting existing operations. The key steps included:
- Creating Legal Entity Validation
- Performing Legal Entity Validation to confirm business authenticity and verify Gaia-X compliance
- Issuing Verifiable Credentials and sharing validation results with MDS
Step 1: Creating Legal Entity Validation
The first step in validating members was extracting legal information from the MDS members management systems. This included:
- Legal name
- Legal address (country, street, city, postal code, street)
- Legal identifier (VAT ID or Commercial Registration Number)
Since data formats varied (e.g., inconsistent capitalization, localized city names, variations in spacing and hyphens), data normalization was applied to ensure consistency before processing. T-Systems' Trust & Participate service provided built-in normalization features, with additional refinements to enhance accuracy.
While extended validations (verifying legal representatives) are possible, they were excluded from the PoC to avoid handling personal data.
Step 2: Performing the Legal Entity validation
With the data in the appropriate form, it was submitted to T-Systems' Trust & Participate for validation. The solution supports multiple Trust Integration Patterns for different ecosystem needs:
- Manual data entry: A simple UI-based approach for quick, low-volume validations, ideal for non-technical users.
- Bulk data upload: Enables CSV/XLSX uploads for batch validation, offering a balance between simplicity and efficiency.
- Clearing House Agent: An open-source integration component that automates data retrieval and validation for ecosystem participants.
- API integration: A highly flexible solution that enables direct, seamless integration into existing systems via REST APIs.
For this PoC, Bulk data upload was chosen for its ease of integration. After transformation, MDS data was uploaded to T-Systems Trust & Participate, where it was validated against trusted sources and converted into tamper-proof Verifiable Credentials.
Step 3: Sharing the results with the Mobility Data Space
Validation results were delivered through a Validation report, detailing:
- The entities submitted for verification
- The methods and data sources used for validation
- The final validation status, including a link to the issued Verifiable Credential
This structured output by the Clearing House node not only confirms whether an entity is valid and compliant but also allows dataspaces to enrich their participant database with additional trusted information.
A secure, seamless onboarding experience
For customers and ecosystem participants, Gaia-X compliance and verifiable credentials ensure:
- Faster onboarding: Eliminates repeated document submissions and manual identity processes
- Enhanced security: Ensures only verified entities gain access to the ecosystem
- Greater transparency: Users stay in control of their data, fostering trust and confidence
Start your journey with T-Systems today!
As we continue our collaboration with Mobility Data Space, we are excited to further enhance trust, security, and efficiency within the mobility ecosystem. Want to be part of the next success story? Discover how T-Systems' Trust & Participate solution helps you establish a secure, compliant, and efficient data ecosystem.
