Methodologies and tools for data sharing agreement infrastructure

This document describes the components, the methodologies and the tools underlying the Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) infrastructure used in the Consequence project. DSAs describe the regulations for managing shared data among multiple participants in several specific domains and contexts. The DSA infrastructure is thus devoted to all the operations underpinning these agreements such as creation, (cooperative) authoring/editing, analysis, manipulation and translation. We envisage in particular that the DSA infrastructure should be at least able to take natural language description of DSAs, provide tools for collaborative editing and then provide mechanisms to translate them into formal descriptions amenable of rigorous analysis and prediction tools. Eventually, we need also components for translating such formal descriptions into directly enforceable policies at system level so as to be appropriately managed in other components being developed for the Consequence framework.