mathematics Article Techniques to Improve B2B Data Governance Using FAIR Principles Cristina Georgiana Calancea * and Lenut , a Alboaie *   Citation: Calancea, C.G.; Alboaie, L. Techniques to Improve B2B Data Governance Using FAIR Principles. Mathematics 2021, 9, 1059. https:// doi.org/10.3390/math9091059 Academic Editors: Octavian Dospinescu and Juan Jose García-Machado Received: 30 March 2021 Accepted: 7 May 2021 Published: 9 May 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Faculty of Computer Science, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, 6600 Ias , i, Romania * Correspondence: gcalancea@info.uaic.ro (C.G.C.); adria@info.uaic.ro (L.A.); Tel.: +40-720-711-265 (C.G.C.) Abstract: Sharing data along the economic supply/demand chain represents a catalyst to improve the performance of a digitized business sector. In this context, designing automatic mechanisms for structured data exchange, that should also ensure the proper development of B2B processes in a regulated environment, becomes a necessity. Even though the data format used for sharing can be modeled using the open methodology, we propose the use of FAIR principles to additionally offer business entities a way to define commonly agreed upon supply, access and ownership procedures. As an approach to manage the FAIR modelled metadata, we propose a series of methodologies to follow. They were integrated in a data marketplace platform, which we developed to ensure they are properly applied. For its design, we modelled a decentralized architecture based on our own blockchain mechanisms. In our proposal, each business entity can host and structure its metadata in catalog, dataset and distribution assets. In order to offer businesses full control over the data supplied through our system, we designed and implemented a sharing mechanism based on access policies defined by the business entity directly in our data marketplace platform. In the proposed approach, metadata-based assets sharing can be done between two or multiple businesses, which will be able to manually access the data in the management interface and programmatically through an authorized data point. Business specific transactions proposed to modify the semantic model are validated using our own blockchain based technologies. As a result, security and integrity of the FAIR data in the collaboration process is ensured. From an architectural point of view, the lack of a central authority to manage the vehiculated data ensures businesses have full control of the terms and conditions under which their data is used. Keywords: B2B data governance mechanisms; methodologies to model and manage FAIR data; de- centralized B2B data marketplace architecture; metadata as blockchain assets; transactions controlled semantic model; access policy based data sharing 1. Cross-Sector B2B Data Sharing and Its Impact on the Companies Ecosystem For a long time, companies strictly relied on traditional Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions to evolve. These transactions refer to purchasing and selling physical raw goods, with the goal to complete the product manufacture process [1]. Usually, the obtained product represents the base of Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions. In order to ensure the success of B2C transactions, all companies involved in the B2B collaboration chain need to have an overview of the raw good demand and their supply capacity in comparison to similar businesses [2]. As a result, data sharing between companies has become a key aspect in the process of growing business opportunities in the past years. B2B data sharing refers to “making data available to or accessing data from other companies for business purposes” [3] either for free or by making a payment to the data holder. The business owner has the option to choose who to share the data with and under which conditions. In [4], the author emphasizes the need to share data between well-established com- panies in order to encourage innovation. Data sharing comes as a prerequisite since one company alone cannot envision the complete perspective of the economic supply/demand Mathematics 2021, 9, 1059. https://doi.org/10.3390/math9091059 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematics