Solid Databox

Key Features

• Isolated Security: Every program relationship is a separate security domain.
• Immutable Records: Accepted records are not silently overwritten; changes create linked, auditable events.
• Long-term Connections: Connection credentials are portable, rotatable, and holder-bound API keys.
• Cryptographic Receipts: Every accepted submission produces a signed receipt.

Developer Resources

To set up a Databox for your organisation, you must define an Institution Profile and connect it to the Databox Forge control plane.

Live in-browser demos with synthetic data — no backend required.

Commerce & POS

• POS Terminal: Full point-of-sale interface with cart, checkout, tax handling, cash/card payments, and receipt generation.
• Waiter Ordering: Table-side order management with kitchen dispatch, real-time order tracking, and item-level quantity control.
• Customer Self-Order: Kiosk-style self-service ordering for customers, reducing friction at the counter.
• Promotional Display: Digital signage and promotional display preview for in-store screens.
• Receipt Management: Browse, search, and view all issued receipts with full order details.

Infrastructure & Hosting

• Hosting Setup: One-click Cloudflare DNS and tunnel configuration with apex domain, www subdomain, and origin binding.
• IPMS Modules: Dynamic module system with enable/disable toggles, capability declarations, and route management.
• Connector Mappings: ODBC and LDAP connector simulator with connection string testing and query preview.
• Event Dispatcher: Dispatch and monitor typed events across the Databox infrastructure.
• Program Management: Create and manage organisation programs with full lifecycle support.

Governance & Credentials

• Governance: Role bindings, ODRL policy management, approval gates, and resolution workflows.
• Verifiable Credentials: Issue, verify, and revoke W3C verifiable credentials for members and programs.
• Member Management: Provision member pods, manage lifecycle states, and send LDN notifications.
• Operations: Phase 3 operational horizontals — consent, delegation, emergency, inventory, loyalty, and pricing.

Consumer Rights (ADR-0023)

• Access Requests: Receive and process consumer access requests with approve/deny workflows.
• Correction Requests: Handle consumer-initiated data corrections with field-level change tracking.
• Consumer Ledger: Immutable event ledger tracking all consumer interactions and transactions.
• Data Portability: Export and import data in standard formats, with full portability registry tracking.

Commerce & Retail

• POS: Full point-of-sale — cart, cash register, customer ordering, table sessions, promotions, tickets, native device contract.
• Menu: Menu management with item categories, pricing, and availability.
• Catalogue: Product catalogue with variants and attributes.
• Pricing: Retail pricing and wholesale pricing engine.
• Discounts: Discount engine with rules, stacking, and conditional logic.
• Loyalty: Loyalty program management with points and tiers.
• Barcode: Barcode scanning and lookup.
• EFTPOS: EFTPOS terminal integration.
• Payments: Payments, refunds, splits, subscriptions, and tax.

Food & Health Safety

• Allergy Profile: Allergen matching, ingredient declarations, consumer allergy profiles.
• Concessions: Concession and entitlement management.
• Emergency: Break-glass emergency access controls.
• Consent: Consent management and tracking.
• Delegation: Delegation of authority management.
• Device Auth: Device authentication and registration.

Operations & Logistics

• Delivery: Delivery management, driver dispatch, and driver management.
• Inventory: Stock management and inventory tracking.
• Bookings: Reservation and availability management.
• Jobs: Work-order and job management.
• Events: Event management and dispatching.
• Feeds: Product feed generation.
• Print: Print shop management and job routing.
• Quotations: Quotation management and rendering.

Governance & Identity

• Governance: Role bindings, ODRL policy management, approval gates, resolution workflows.
• Credentials: W3C VC issuance, verification, revocation, and lifecycle.
• Access: Credential-gated access control.
• Consumer: Consumer access requests, correction requests, and rights management.
• Provenance: Provenance tracking and chain of custody.
• Reputation: Reputation management.
• Licensing: Licensing management.
• Org Network: Organisational unit and network management.

Infrastructure & Integration

• Hosting: Cloudflare DNS, tunnel configuration, and hosting setup.
• Integration: ODBC/LDAP connector contracts, R2RML mapping, runtime plans.
• Backups: Backup management and scheduling.
• Accounting: Accounting bridge and ledger integration.
• Tax: Tax engine with jurisdiction-aware calculation.
• Notifications: Notification management and delivery.
• I18n: Internationalisation and locale negotiation.
• A11y: Accessibility auditing and contrast checking.
• Theming: Theming tokens and customisation system.

Web & Social

• Website: Public website with customer display renderer, public feed renderer, SEO, sitemap/robots.
• Social: Social notes and interactions.
• Business: Business information and opening hours.
• HR: Human resources module.
• Household: Household management.
• Records: Record entries and management.
• Receipt: Receipt documents and management.
• Ticketing: Ticketing system.
• MCP: Model Context Protocol server API.

Identity & Authorization

• Opaque Provisioning: 128-bit cryptographically secure opaque Databox URL generation — no customer identifiers in paths.
• Tenant Isolation: Per-program tenant binding, context, isolation guard, and resolver.
• Authenticated Context: Assurance crosswalk between IdP claims and Databox assurance levels, step-up authentication.
• Connection Credentials: Holder-bound, program-specific, revocable W3C Verifiable Credentials with bitstring status lists, ES256 signing, and RFC 8693 token exchange.
• Composed Authorizer: Integrates Databox policy with WAC/ACP, reason codes, and step-up response handling.

Policy & Compliance

• ODRL Policy Engine: Versioned policy bundles, conflict strategy, constraint evaluation, duty engine with state machine and handlers.
• Compliance Engine: Australian compliance registry with pinned legislation, compliance digest, and decision-support views.
• Policy Evaluator: ODRL permission/prohibition/duty evaluation with complexity guard and bundle admission.

Exchange & Evidence

• Deposit/Submission Gateway: Idempotency registry, RDF shape validation, binary evidence quarantine, and real evidence scanners.
• Record Proof Validation: Canonicalization, issuer trust store, offline verification, and record proof suite.
• Signed Receipts: Durable commit before receipt issuance, state progression, and receipt verification.
• Evidence Ledger: Append-only evidence chain with audit projection and ledger store.
• Append-Only Storage: Supersession links, tombstone handling, and correction history.

Review & Notification

• Governed Review Queue: Review assurance, disposition workflow, signed dispositions, and append-only disposition store.
• Transactional Outbox: Outbox drainer with cursor recovery, SSRF-guarded endpoint validation, and outbound notification channels.
• Cursor Feed: Cursor-based recovery feed with pagination for catch-up after disconnection.
• Institutional Bridge: Source-outbox consumption, relationship resolution, and institutional record builder.
• Reference Consumer Agent: Consumer connection registry, local knowledge store, scoped submissions, and ODRL terms presenter.

App Profiles

• Waiter App: Table-side order management (local-only network scope).
• Driver App: Delivery driver management (remote-capable).
• Tradie App: Trade/tradie field service (local-only).
• Print App: Print shop operations (local-only).
• Scorekeeper App: Scorekeeping for events (local-only).
• Referee App: Referee management for sports (local-only).

Container Features

• Dynamic Module Loading: UI component bundles fetched from IPMS at boot.
• Per-Install VC Licensing: Each install receives a Verifiable Credential licence binding app, org, device, scope, and permissions.
• Network Scope Enforcement: Service worker enforces local-only vs remote-capable access.
• Solid-OIDC Auth: PWA shell with Solid-OIDC authentication.
• Profile-Driven Availability: Apps filtered by org's enabled IPMS modules and vertical profile.

POS Edge & Proxy

• POS Edge (native): Rust POS edge with ESC/POS thermal printer support, cash drawer control, QR code generation, local HTTP server, and IPC.
• POS Edge Proxy (rust): Proxy layer for POS edge communication.
• Hardware Abstraction: Hardware abstraction layer for printers, cash drawers, and barcode scanners.

System & Integration

• Installer (native): Cross-platform installer with macOS launchd service registration, platform-aware Node.js provisioning, pre-flight checks, and deployment handoff.
• Tray Supervisor (rust): System tray supervisor for desktop lifecycle management.
• Connector Sidecar (rust): Connector sidecar for IPMS integration with ODBC/LDAP bridging and RDF mapping.

Bridge Microservice (TypeScript)

• Solid-OIDC Client: DPoP-bound access tokens for reading Pods; short-lived, cached, fail-closed on expiry.
• CKAN Action API Client: HTTP-only RPC client (package_show, package_create, package_update, datastore_create/upsert/search, organization_show/create, user_show, activity_data_list).
• SHACL Validator: Fail-closed validation before any data reaches CKAN; non-compliant data is quarantined.
• RDF→Tabular Translator: Program-profile-driven field mapping with PII anonymisation (stripped, hashed, generalised) and evidence recording.
• Publication Pipeline: Idempotent via sha256(podIri:contentDigest); bounded retries with quarantine on max-retries-exceeded.
• Webhook Handler: HMAC-SHA256 signature verification, idempotent event deduplication, routes dataset_created/updated/deleted events.
• Reconciliation & Drift Detection: Periodic sweeps compare Pod state with CKAN state; detects editor-originated drift and orphaned CKAN datasets.
• Correction Propagation: Propagates Databox review dispositions (corrected, statement-associated, partially-corrected, etc.) to CKAN datasets with per-recipient notification duties.
• Metadata Feedback: Writes append-only feedback entries back to the Pod when CKAN metadata changes.
• Disclosure Ledger: Append-only evidence chain recording every publication, correction, and anonymisation event.
• HTTP Endpoints: /health, /publish, /webhook.

CKAN Plugin (Python)

• Thin Plugin: ckanext-databox-bridge — no business logic, no RDF parsing, no Solid auth. All heavy lifting is in the bridge microservice.
• Webhook Emission: Emits HMAC-signed webhooks on dataset lifecycle events (created, updated, deleted) to the bridge.
• Custom Action API: ckan_bridge_status (public read-only) and ckan_bridge_sync (service-token-only) for callback synchronisation.
• Dataset Schema Extensions: Adds databox_provenance_iri, databox_policy_iri, databox_shacl_shape_iri, databox_consent_receipt_iri fields to CKAN dataset schemas.
• Write Access Control: Bridge service API token is the only authorised writer; public users get read-only.

Testing

• 197 unit tests across 18 test suites — 92.5% statement coverage.
• Adversarial security tests: HMAC replay, signature forgery, token expiry fail-closed, DPoP key load failure.
• Conformance tests: SHACL fail-closed, idempotency dedup, max-retries quarantine, Pod 403 fail-closed.
• E2E integration test: Full Pod→SHACL→translate→CKAN publish→ledger flow.

Deployment

• Kubernetes: Deployment, Service, ConfigMap, NetworkPolicies, Kustomize manifests included.
• Secrets: CKAN API token, DPoP key, webhook secret mounted from Kubernetes Secrets — never inlined.
• Config: SHACL shapes and program profile mounted from ConfigMaps.
• Strict ESLint: TypeScript strict + stylistic presets; zero lint errors.

Test Coverage

• 188 unit test files across 24 Databox subsystems (agent, authorization, bridge, IPMS, compliance, context, credential, evidence, feed, gateway, identifiers, notification, ODRL, policy, profile, proof, provisioning, receipt, review, storage, tenant).
• 99 IPMS-specific unit tests covering module APIs, stores, and handlers.
• 6 integration tests including live CSS/OIDC/WAC, IPMS handler, IPMS accessibility, Oxigraph sync, vanilla mode, and vertical profiles.
• Fail-closed stubs verified by dedicated test — no stub silently permits access.

Deployment Options

• Docker Compose: IPMS deployment via docker-compose.ipms.yml with environment configuration.
• Kubernetes: Kubernetes manifests for production IPMS deployment.
• Secret Management: Secret templates for deployment configuration.
• Live CSS Preset: Experimental Components.js preset for mounting the Forge inside a running CSS instance.
• Native Installer: Cross-platform installer for macOS with service registration.

Cross-Platform Installer

• macOS Support: Universal installer for both Intel (x86_64) and Apple Silicon (Metal/aarch64) architectures.
• Platform-Aware Node.js Provisioning: Automatically downloads the correct Node.js binary for the host platform and architecture.
• Native Service Registration: Uses launchd and launchctl for macOS service management with privilege detection.

Native POS Edge

• Rust Hardware Bridge: Native POS-edge component in Rust for direct hardware integration.
• Thermal Printer Support: ESC/POS protocol support for thermal receipt printers.
• Cash Drawer Control: Direct cash drawer kick-out commands via connected printer hardware.
• HTTP & IPC: Local HTTP server with IPC for inter-process communication and lifecycle events.