As part of the Gaia-X Federation Services project, a new Whitepaper titled “Self-Description of Resources, Service Offerings and Participants within Gaia-X Ecosystems” was published by GXFS-DE today. The Whitepaper explains the use of so-called Self-Descriptions in the context of future Gaia-X Federations. Self-Descriptions will serve as a source of information including descriptions of participants and their service offerings.

Gaia-X requires all providers to describe themselves and their service offerings using standardized, machine-readable metadata called Self-Descriptions. Such Self-Descriptions will for example include information like the address of a company, a specific service description or certificates and labels. Based on such information, Self-Descriptions will help foster trust among participants in a Gaia-X Federation.

The Whitepaper illustrates what classes of service offerings can be described, and what attributes their Self-Descriptions can comprise. It also, provides an overview of the governance process of the Gaia-X Working Group Service Characteristics, which offers opportunities for Gaia-X members to feed into the development process.

There are practical tools such as a creation wizard with interactive web forms which guides non-technical end users towards writing valid Self-Descriptions. Further libraries are planned that enable software to read, write and process Self-Descriptions to assist with the execution of the governance process.

Source: https://www.gxfs.eu/