Data spaces are moving from design to operation, and each of them still answers the same questions alone: who may join, which roles and decision rights apply, what a contract must contain, how permitted use and consent are expressed, and what evidence proves compliance. Europe pays that legal and technical cost many times over, and the results do not line up. Prometheus-X, which leads the governance work package of DS4Skills, has spent the past year turning these questions into assets that other data spaces can reuse.

The Rulebook: v0.4

The DS4Skills rulebook reached version 0.4 in July 2026. It holds 129 rules in 12 clusters and 18 defined roles, organised as a common baseline, use-case profiles and controlled local extensions. Each rule is written for people and for machines: all 129 are mapped to W3C ODRL, which gives 192 machine-readable policy objects, a DS4Skills ODRL profile and validation shapes. Behind it sits a traceable chain from policy intent to normative rule, control, evidence, verification and remedy. Thirty-six review comments have been integrated. Version 0.4 remains a working draft under legal, data-protection, use-case and technical review; rule-by-rule verification in real workflows (consent propagation, AI services with human oversight) is planned for the last quarter of 2026, and the consolidated governance framework is due in early 2027.

The Contract Model: From Legal Prose to Data

The contract model evolves with it. What used to be legal prose is becoming a structured contract data model: context and legal basis, participants and roles, offers and resources, usage policy, pricing, service levels, commitments and penalties, duration, termination and exit. Designed as data rather than text alone, it is built to connect with the catalogue, the contract manager and the connectors, so that contracting can be automated step by step. Use cases are already stress-testing it. In our first cross-data-space use case with the Trusted European Media Space (TEMS), media partners have brought what trusted content needs: AI usage rights (retrieval, training, fine-tuning), provenance metadata, territorial scope and reuse permissions.

Beyond Skills: A Shared Doctrine

Beyond skills, the approach is shared through the DSIF Cross-Data Space Rulebook Working Group, coordinated by Olivier Dion. Its doctrine is simple: interoperate, do not unify. Each data space keeps its sector and local rules but structures them so they can be compared, reused and negotiated across boundaries. The approach has been validated with practitioners from tourism, smart cities, health, agriculture and mobility. The DS4Skills package opens this month as a seed to inspect and challenge, a candidate v0.9 of a European rulebook commons is targeted for December 2026 and a v1.0 for early 2027.

A non-binding Memorandum of Understanding is open to any data space that wants to join: contact olivier@onecub.fr.