2. 🌐 Gaia-X Meta-Registry (GXMR)¶

The Gaia-X Meta-Registry (GXMR) is an open and collaborative project designed to gather and harmonize ecosystem descriptions using a common ontology. Its goal is to ensure interoperability, semantic alignment, and technical compatibility across data spaces and ecosystems based on the Gaia-X Trust Framework, in particular Gaia-X technical compatibility.

By using a shared ontology, the Gaia-X Metaregistry¹ allows different ecosystems to describe themselves in a consistent, machine-readable, and human-understandable way.

As the first use case and initial requirements for the GXMR arose in the connex of a federated trust use case in the IMX (International Manufacturing-X) realm, the first element in the ecosystem description is the so-called Ecosystem Trust Profile.

An Ecosystem Trust Profile simply (pun intended) lists 1. all trust service providers of the particular ecosystem and the verifiable credentials they issue, and (this is the important part) 2. all foreign trust service providers and their verifiable credentials the ecosystem trusts.

This allows cross-ecosystem trust or federated trust between different ecosystems to emerge at the intersection of Ecosystem Trust Profiles for different ecosystems. This is based on a conceptual (mathematical) foundation you can find here.

In the future, we expect the need for additional entries in the ecosystem description to emerge. In that respect, we follow a strict co-innovation and co-development-led approach: Ecosystems are invited to submit their real requirements regarding the Gaia-X Meta-Registry and its contents – and we will duly follow that up within the Gaia-X AISBL’s processes and entities. This is not going to be a theoretical exercise but should be driven by concrete demand of data space or digital ecosystem projects and initiatives.

2.1 📘 Project Overview¶

This repository serves as:

• A registry of ecosystem descriptions using a unified semantic model
• A GitLab Pages-powered documentation site that can be accessed 👉 here
• A source for ontology and schema files (owl.ttl, shacl.ttl, context-ld.json) for reference and validation

/
├── docs/   
│   ├──README.md
│   ├──ecosystem_ontology.md
│   └── ecosystems/
│          ├── gaia-x/
│          ├── imx/
│          ├── ecosystem-3/
│          ├── ecosystem-4/
│          │     ├──ecosystem.json
│          │     └──README.md
│          └── ...
├── CONTRIBUTING.md
└── README.md

2.2 🧩 Ontology & Schemas¶

The Gaia-X Meta-Registry Ontology defines the shared vocabulary used across all ecosystem descriptions. The complete ontology can be found here: Ecosystem

2.2.1 📦 Using the Ontology¶

You can reference the ontology directly in your RDF, Turtle, or JSON-LD data using the following base URIs:

{
  "@context": "https://w3id.org/gaia-x/development#Ecosystem"
}

2.3 🤝 Contributing Ecosystem Descriptions¶

We welcome contributions from all Gaia-X participants and ecosystem maintainers. Each ecosystem should be represented in its own folder under /ecosystems/. To contribute: 1. Fork this repository. 2. Add your ecosystem folder and description files. i. Add your description using the ontology and supporting files (shacl.ttl, ecosystem.json, and a README.md) 3. Validate them against the SHACL shapes. 4. Open a Merge Request.

For detailed instructions and validation guidelines, please refer to the 📜 CONTRIBUTING.md

2.4 🌐 W3ID Redirection & HTTP Content Negotiation¶

The Gaia-X Meta-Registry ontology and ecosystem descriptions are also accessible via persistent URLs under the w3id.org

This setup ensures: - Long-term persistence and reliability of ontology URIs - Automatic HTTP content negotiation, allowing clients to request different serializations (e.g., Turtle, RDF/XML, JSON-LD) - Seamless redirection from human-friendly identifiers (e.g., https://w3id.org/gaia-x/) to the hosted GitLab Pages files

More details can be found here: Gaia-X Service Characteristics WG

2.5 ⚖️ License¶

This project is distributed under the Eclipse Public License. See the LICENSE