The main components of the OMEGA-X architecture, influenced by both Gaia-X and IDSA, are the Data & App marketplace, the Identity Manager, the Federated Catalog, the Data Clearing House and the OMEGA-X Connector. In this article we put a spotlight on two of them: the Federated Catalog and the Digital Clearing House.
Digital Clearing House (DCH)
The DCH offers a solution to verify the compliance with the data space rules in an automated way. Hence, any OMEGA-X adopter (consumer, provider, federator) can make use of the DCH to obtain such compliance, join a federation or even become a federator, apart from the possibility to proceed with additional services.
The Clearing House is an intermediary, whose job is to arrange clearing and settlement services for every data exchange transaction. All activities that are performed at the time of data exchange, are logged in a Clearing House: once a data exchange is completed, the Data Provider and the Data Consumer each have to log the details of the transaction in order to confirm a data transfer. After that , the Clearing House can provide reports on the transactions that were logged for various purposes, such as billing or resolution of conflicts.
With the aim to create such a solution, the initial steps implied the deployment of a set of constitutive components, as well as its validation through a series of internal tests that were showcased in recent events to which OMEGA-X participated. The mandatory components already deployed include the Registry, Compliance, and Notary ones.
Federated Catalog
An other component that will play a pivotal role when interacting with the DCH and the OMEGA-X data space as a whole, is the Federated Catalog. It will enable data and service providers to promote their offerings while keeping control over their visibility and privacy, while on the other hand consumers will find there a way to locate offerings that perfectly suit their expectations and even monitor potential changes in them.
The federated catalog offers a harmonised and secure catalog of the self-description of data, services and participants and providing the mechanisms for secure and sovereign data exchanges.
OMEGA-X architecture
The main modules of the OMEGA-X Federated Catalog are elaborated in the following table.
| Module | Description |
| Catalog | Responsible for managing data assets, resources, service offerings and participants’ self-descriptions and usage policies, making them discoverable. |
| Self-Description Tools | Concern tools enabling the creation, visualization and validation of self-descriptions. |
| Monitoring & metering | The module is responsible for monitoring all activity in OMEGA-X and creating metrics on that activity, such as counting the number of times a data offering is contracted, counting the number of times a service is executed etc. |
| Vocabulary | Concerns tools enabling the sharing of ontologies and data models, related to the data. |
Currently OMEGA-X partners are working on the preparation of a complete and comprehensive Catalog. Stay tuned…..!