In the age of globalization and international collaboration, collaborative data sharing is crucial for computer-aided research. There is a growing demand for spontaneous, short-lived, and fine-grained collaboration acts that could be satisfied by a decentralized platform for the management of entities (users, groups, datasets). Our research is based on a pre-existing concept of such a decentralized platform, called the decentralized entity persistence layer (DEPL). We describe a novel architecture extending DEPL, called DEPL-DA, which introduces an idea of decentralized authority, allowing entities to be managed collectively by multiple organizations, at the same time ensuring fault tolerance and improving availability. Our proposal utilizes a synergy between consensus and atomic commitment protocols (AC&C) providing decentralization of authority over entities, at the same time providing means to perform atomic modifications of entities spanning across multiple authoritative domains. We propose two approaches to the integration of AC&C: competitive and cooperative, and implement them based on several existing AC&C protocols. The evaluation shows the differences between approaches and protocols used, as well as the fact that both approaches are viable and offer latencies acceptable by operations related to entity management.

In order to realize collaboration on a global scale, academic research requires often large quantities of data to be shared between geographically dispersed organizations.The requirement to protect and govern data in a network of loosely coupled, autonomous institutions is an incentive for decentralized solutions, where the participants are in full control of their data without trusting a third-party provider to store and process the data.In order to increase data availability and fault tolerance in decentralized collaborative systems, we propose a layer, which is based on replication and decentralized authority over the data.The solution consists of an idea of peer-sets, which are groups of peers implementing collective data management, a consensus protocol which synchronizes a distributed ledger between peers, and an atomic commitment protocol used to implement optional two-way references between documents.This architecture may be utilized in various decentralized collaborative data-sharing systems, such as Onedata.