Doctoral Student

**Presentation of Mines Saint-Etienne**

Joining Mines Saint-Étienne means committing to an institution where **science and innovation build a more sustainable future**. It is a school of excellence where everyone has the **opportunity to unlock their full potential** and **contribute to tackling the challenges of tomorrow**.

Ranked among the top engineering schools in France and recognized worldwide, our school, a member of the _Institut Mines-Télécom_, educates the talents of tomorrow while actively addressing major industrial, digital, and environmental challenges. By joining us, you become part of a community of 500 members of staff, 2,500 students and take part in an ambitious project: combining academic excellence, cutting-edge research, and positive societal impact.

The _Institut Mines-Télécom_ brings together France’s leading _Grandes Ecoles_ to tackle major industrial, digital, energy, and environmental challenges. With its eight public _Grandes Écoles_ and two affiliated Graduate Schools, it is the leading public institute dedicated to engineers and managers. Together, we imagine and build a sustainable future by educating the leaders who will shape tomorrow’s transitions.

**JOB ENVIRONMENT AND JOB DESCRIPTION**:
**1.Thesis title and fields**

**Advanced data access contract negotiation in data spaces**
- Disciplinary field and speciality: Computer Science, Data Management
- Keywords: semantic web, knowledge representation, data spaces, open digital rights language, data profile

**2. Host structure(s) and/or laboratory(ies)**

Mines Saint-Étienne, Institut Henri Fayol, 29 rue Pierre et Dominique Ponchardier, 42000 Saint-Étienne, France

**3. Thesis registration**
- Doctoral school: Ecole nationale supérieure des mines de Saint-Etienne
- Attached doctoral school: ED 488: SCIENCES INGÉNIERIE SANTÉ (SIS)
- Host laboratory: LIMOS UMR 6158

**4. Framing**

Antoine Zimmermann, IMT Professor at Mines Saint-Étienne,
Maxime Lefrançois, IMT Senior Assistant at Mines Saint-Étienne.

**5. Background and**

The European data strategy aims to strengthen EU sovereignty and competitiveness by facilitating the exchange and exploitation of data within data spaces (Curry et al., 2022). These spaces consist of distributed infrastructures defined by a governance framework, enabling reliable data transactions between participants while supporting data trust and sovereignty (Data Spaces Support Centre, 2023). The challenge is thus to create a global ecosystem where data flows are as fluid and controlled as traditional supply chains, implying challenges in terms of reliable sharing, usage control and business models (Bacco et al., 2024).

The work of Theissen-Lipp (2024) highlights the semantic foundations of data spaces. Various frameworks are emerging - Gaia-X, IDS, EOSC, Solid Data Spaces - all based on web standards, and employing semantic web technologies to facilitate data management in line with the FAIR principles (Hauff et al., 2024; Meckler et al., 2023). For example, the IDS-IM vocabulary (Bader et al., 2020) takes up and extends DCAT for data catalog description (Albertoni et al., 2024), DQV for data quality (Debattista et al., 2016), or Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) for data access conditions (Iannella and Villata, 2018). Data structure could be described more finely with formalisms such as JSON-Schema (Schema, 2022) or SHACL (Knublauch and Kontokostas, 2017), potentially generated automatically via frameworks such as Semantic Data Link, which employs LinkML (Stäbler et al., 2024).

In a data space, an access contract is negotiated between a data provider and a data consumer. An unexplored research direction to date is to imagine the variety of negotiation types possible, in particular, flexible data negotiation processes where the format or semantics of the data itself can be negotiated. For example, a customer might only need a subset of a dataset offered by a supplier. He might offer a lower rate on the basis that he doesn't have access to all the data, but the supplier will have to carry out additional processing on the data, which could justify a higher rate.

The concept of content negotiation on the web describes mechanisms that enable different versions of a document to be served to the same URI (Svensson et al., 2024). In his thesis, Taghzouti (2024) defended the interest of fine-grained and flexible content negotiation, taking into account the fact that content negotiation is not a monolithic process, but rather composed of several stages. Applied to data exchange contracts in data spaces, content negotiation can serve as a starting point for certain advanced mechanisms that enable exchanges to be tailored to the specificities of the parties involved, their preferences and their technological capabilities. In particular, we will be looking at profile-based approaches to content negotiation (Taghzouti, 2023).

The aim of this thesis is to propose a formalization and a methodological framew