This Federation Architecture Pattern (FAP) on Decentralized Catalogue Management (DCM) makes it easier to find and compare services from different providers for a company or organization without having to store everything in one central place. Instead of separate, isolated catalogues, they are linked together.
Purpose & Value
This FAP addresses one of the key challenges in federated ecosystems: fragmented and siloed service catalogues. Its purpose is to enable discovery, comparison, and integration of digital services like cloud and resources like product passport across multiple catalogues without centralizing them.
By introducing a multi-catalogue abstraction layer, it allows seamless cross-catalogue searches, service registration, and metadata harmonization while ensuring interoperability, transparency and supporting compliance requirements.
Service Discoverability
Enhances service discoverability across multiple cloud offerings, data spaces, and domains.
Decouplement
Reduces vendor lock-in and decouples catalogue management.
Sovereignty
Supports sovereignty and trust through verifiable service and resource listings.
Cross-border Scalability
Enables scalability for cross-border and cross-sector federations.
Scope & Boundaries
Included in the Decentralized Catalogue Management FAP:
- Unified search across distributed service catalogues.
- Interoperable service listings and metadata exchange.
- Integration with Orchestration Engine (ORCE) for lifecycle management (deployment hooks, updates).
- Integration of Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM) for secure service and resource access.
- Support for cross-domain use cases.
Excluded from the Decentralized Catalogue Management FAP:
- Data edits, updates, resynchronization
- Schema harmonization
- Service instantiations
- Deep integration
This FAP builds as follows:
Feature-FAPs:
- Asset Crawler Search & Aggregation,
- Catalogue and Schema Registry.
Micro-FAPs (examples):
- Schema Mapping: Link local schema attributes with remote schema attributes.
- Service Listing Verification: Verify claim owner against Trust Anchor.
FAP Components:
- Local Catalogue Functional layer and UI
- Local Management of the meta data collection and User Interactions
- Catalogue Registry and UI
- Maintain Remote Catalogue Services with relevant attributes like API, Trust Anchor, Schema types, Query languages etc.
- Schema Registry and UI
- Mapping of local schema with remote schema per Catalogue entity
- Asset Crawler
- On demand remote crawling of available remote descriptions and transformation into local schema representation with storage in local meta data collection
XFSC Services:
- CAT (Catalogue) – local data container for services and assets.
- OCM/PCM – organization and participant credential managers.
- ORCE – orchestration hooks for resource lifecycle .
- AAS – authentication and authorization service.
DCM FAP adheres to
- W3C DID/VC: Decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials for asset provenance.
- OIDC4VC: Standardized flows for credential issuance.
- DIDComm v2: Secure communication between participants.
- Gaia-X Trust Framework: Compliance, trust anchor, catalogue integration.
- JSON-LD: Linked data for standardized service metadata.
- OpenAPI / GraphQL: Service discovery and integration APIs.
- GDPR: Data minimization and lawful processing of metadata.
DCM FAP is designed to be used as follows:
Cross-domain Reuse:
- Mobility: distributed fleet service catalogues.
- Health: cross-border medical data service registries.
- Supply chain: digital product pass listings.
Reusable Modules:
- Federated search abstraction layer.
- Metadata normalization & verification service.
- Synchronization service.
Variants:
- Lightweight catalogue integration (SMEs).
- Regulated/sector-specific catalogues (finance, health).
- Hybrid: local catalogue + Gaia-X compliant synchronization.