#### Development and simulation environment for digital data marketplace applications

A digital data marketplace (DDM) is an environment in which organisations or individuals participate to reap the (commercial, scientific or other) benefits of data publication and processing. Datamarket participants can find datasets, analysis algorithms and data-processing services or make these available under certain conditions such as payment, usage restriction, or name attribution. A transaction agreement between two parties lays out the conditions under which (data or algorithm) resources can be accessed. However, it is often desired to involve additional parties, for example when data about a subject (e.g. patient, client or citizen) is spread across various organisations, or when a trusted third party should process data on another party's behalf. In such cases, consortium agreements lay out additional conditions under which data processing can occur, as agreed by the consortium as a whole. 

Technically a DDM can be realised by establishing virtual networks between participants using techniques from cloud computing or software definable networks. A data exchange application, running on such a network, is triggered by the submission of a data analysis workflow and subsequently turning the workflow into an execution plan. (Network) Policies enforce the conditions laid out in the consortium agreement, ensuring only plans compliant with the consortium agreement are executed. The goal of this project is to determine whether a workflow and a consortium agreement are compatible as part of their construction, before attempting to execute the workflow as a data exchange application. This way, potentially costly deployment and execution steps of (ultimately) non-compliant execution plans can be avoided.

The envisioned end result of the project is a digital data marketplace simulation environment in which a domain-specific language is used to program data exchange applications and data exchange applications are tested for compliance against a given consortium agreements. As such, you will gain experience in language design, language engineering and the development of integrated development environments (IDEs). The work will be based on existing domain-specific languages developed within the Informatics Institute, namely Brane for developing workflows [1] and eFLINT for developing data exchange agreements [2,3], as well as novel research into exploratory programming environments [4].

[1] Brane: A Framework for Programmable Orchestration of Multi-Site Applications. https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience51609.2021.00056
[2] eFLINT: a domain-specific language for executable norm specifications. https://doi.org/10.1145/3425898.3426958
[3] Dynamic generation of access control policies from social policies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2021.12.221
[4] A Generic Back-End for Exploratory Programming. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83978-9_2