The concept of data spaces has gained significant momentum in Europe, and for a good reason. The influence of data is continuously increasing and affecting various aspects of our lifestyles, including production, consumption, and general living. The main goal of the initiative is to improve lives and boost the EU’s competitiveness in the global digital economy. The advantages of creating shared European data spaces are diverse and significant, spanning from better healthcare, promoting sustainable energy usage and intelligent transportation to informed decision-making processes for implementing the European Green Deal Strategy.

Europe envisions common data spaces as places where secure and efficient data exchange across borders, sectors, and institutions can occur by bringing together relevant data infrastructures and governance frameworks while addressing concerns related to data sovereignty and privacy1. 

Across the continent, there are several ongoing initiatives and projects aimed at developing data spaces as digital ecosystems for data sharing and collaboration across various industries and sectors, including research. E- infrastructures, like EGI, play an important role since common European data spaces rely on strong technical data infrastructure, interconnection and interoperability.

The EGI Federation, which includes the EGI Foundation and federation participants, through its partnership with various stakeholders, is actively engaged in supporting these initiatives by providing the necessary technology, tools, and expertise. In more detail, EGI provides:

1. Technological Solutions: Through EGI services such as Check-in, Cloud Compute, Notebooks, DataHub and Online Storage, EGI facilitates easy and controlled data access and sharing, data management, tools for processing and storing large amounts of data, and data-intensive applications, to name a few.
2. Policy Development Support: EGI’s policy development support activities help ensure that data spaces are established and managed in a way that promotes transparency, trust, and accountability.
3. Landscape Harmonisation: EGI helps create synergies between different projects and initiatives, identifying common goals, aligning activities and standards, avoiding duplication of effort and maximizing the impact of funding and resources, thus harmonizing the landscape of different data space-related initiatives.
4. Contributions to Projects: EGI leads or contributes to several projects aimed at developing thematic data spaces or contributing to the development of overarching, multidisciplinary data spaces.

Many of the projects in the EGI portfolio deal with data spaces. For instance, in the EGI-ACE project, EGI set up several thematic services in EOSC, and the EGI-ACE data spaces represent a subset of these thematic services that integrate scientific data and online applications into a single unit, enabling the scalable analysis of big datasets on a compute continuum. In the EUHubs4Data project, EGI leads the activities on the Federated Dataset catalogue, comprising datasets from different sources. The data space built in the project will enable data sharing between the partners and the SMEs participating in the project’s funded experiments. EGI also supports EUCAIM, a data space federating cancer imaging data. The infrastructure established by EUCAIM will benefit citizens through improved healthcare procedures and will stimulate the European market through the innovation of new tools and services. EGI is also a partner of EUreka3D project, which will allow cultural heritage institutions to use storage and computing resources to manage their 3D assets.

Besides the technological solutions, EGI also shapes the policy framework on Data Spaces through projects such as GREAT and DSSC. In the GREAT project, EGI leads the work on appropriate governance for the Green Deal Data Space, while in DSSC, EGI is part of the Strategic Stakeholder Group (SSG), a think-tank and action group that aids in achieving policy goals.EGI oversees progress, evaluates results, identifies deficiencies, and provides annual recommendations to assist in the evolution of the Support Centre and other Data Spaces initiatives.

In conclusion, data spaces represent a significant opportunity for businesses and organisations to accelerate their digital transformation by facilitating secure and efficient data exchange while addressing data sovereignty and privacy concerns. EGI, through its partnership with various stakeholders and contributions to different initiatives, is committed to contributing to the growth and success of data spaces, thus advancing the digital economy and society as a whole.