Data Spaces
About Data Spaces
Data spaces have been embraced by the European Commission, which refers to a “single common European data space”, with a conceptual definition as “a seamless digital territory on a scale that enables the development of new data-based products and services”.
Across Europe, there are numerous initiatives and projects underway to develop Data Spaces as digital ecosystems for data sharing and collaboration across industries and sectors. These initiatives seek to accelerate the digital transformation of businesses and organisations by enabling secure and efficient data exchange while also addressing data sovereignty and privacy concerns. EGI is actively engaged in supporting many of these initiatives, working closely with various stakeholders to provide the necessary technology, tools, and expertise to enable the development and deployment of Data Spaces.
Through our project partnerships and contributions to different initiatives in Europe, we are committed to contributing to the growth and success of Data Spaces and to advancing the digital economy and society as a whole.
EGI Support for Data Spaces
EGI provides several services and technology solutions for the development and implementation of Data Spaces. These solutions, for example, enable the sharing and collaboration of data in a secure and trusted environment.
EGI’s policy development support activities help to ensure that data spaces are established and managed in a way that promotes trust, transparency, and accountability.
EGI helps to create synergies between different projects and initiatives, identifying common goals, aligning activities and standards, avoiding duplication of effort and maximising the impact of funding and resources, thus harmonising the landscape of different Data Space related initiatives.
EGI leads or contributes to several projects aimed at developing thematic data spaces or contributing to the development of overarching, multidisciplinary data spaces.
Technological Solutions
Policy Development Support
EGI shapes the policy framework on Data Spaces through projects such as GREAT and DSSC. In 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.
Landscape Harmonisation
Through our involvement in different projects, EGI brings added value by leveraging the EGI Federation’s expertise and knowledge to align and integrate efforts across initiatives. We help harmonise the landscape and ensure that different initiatives and projects work towards a Data Space development without duplicating the efforts. This results in greater efficiency and impact across projects.
Supporting Projects and Use Cases
- Projects and Initiatives
- Use Cases
Our Projects and Initiatives
Many current and past projects in the EGI Portfolio deal with Data Spaces. To start, EGI-ACE set up several thematic services in EOSC; EGI-ACE Data Spaces represented a subset of these thematic services and integrated scientific data and online applications into a single unit, enabling the scalable analysis of big datasets on a compute continuum. These Data Spaces are created via a co-design process between scientific and e-infrastructure communities. In EUHubs4Data, EGI led the activities on the Federated Dataset catalogue, comprising datasets from different sources; the Data Space built in the project will enable sovereignty data sharing between the partners and the SMEs participating in the project’s funded experiments.
Data Space Support Center is the initiative helping define common requirements and create best practices to accelerate the formation of sovereign data spaces as a crucial element of digital transformation.
EUropean Federation for CAncer IMages (EUCAIM) is the cornerstone of the European Commission-initiated European Cancer Imaging Initiative, a flagship of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP), which aims to foster innovation and deployment of digital technologies in cancer treatment and care to achieve more precise and faster clinical decision making, diagnostics, treatment and predictive medicine for cancer patients.
The project will create a fully operational Green Deal Data Space (GDDS) designed to improve the accessibility, integration, and use of green and environmental data across the EU to bolster critical areas of the European Green Deal—Zero Pollution, Climate Adaptation, Biodiversity, and the Circular Economy Action Plan.
The projects will offer a knowledge, service and resource hub based on a smart technical infrastructure whose services are registered on the EOSC. This virtual space will allow cultural heritage institutions to use storage and computing resources to manage their 3D and XR (extended reality) assets.
DATAMITE empowers European companies by delivering a modular, open-source and multi-domain Framework to improve DATA Monetizing, Interoperability, Trading and Exchange, in the form of software modules, training, and business materials. DATAMITE will validate the results in 3 different use cases with a total of 6 pilots, demonstrating that the Framework is interoperable and usable in different domains and user needs, as: 1) Intra-corporate, multi-domain data exchange; 2) Data trading among Data Spaces; 3) Integration with other initiatives as Data Markets, EU AI-on-demand platform, or DIHs. Sectors covered by the pilots are: agriculture, energy, industrial and manufacturing, and climate.
Leveraging the EOSC Compute Platform, EGI-ACE set up a thriving collection of thematic services in EOSC, of which Data Spaces are a subset. The thematic services integrate and host data analytics applications/tools and scientific datasets on top of the Compute Platform, providing discipline-specific capabilities for scientists. The five EGI-ACE Data Spaces are accessible through the EOSC Portal.
The EOSC will be a data space for science, research and innovation, levelling the playing field when accessing data, even “safe” personal data, by the industrial actors and representing a huge potential for disruption, innovation and creation of new business models. The EOSC DIH, a sector-agnostic Digital Innovation Hub, aims to accelerate this disruption by supporting the exploitation of EOSC services like computing, data management and Artificial Intelligence tools by startups, SMEs and the industrial sector.
EUHubs4Data is building a European federation of Data Innovation Hubs and connecting with data incubators and platforms, SME networks, AI communities, skills and training organisations and open data repositories. The EGI-DIH is a member of the Federation.
The GREAT project works towards establishing the Green Deal Data Space (GDDS) Foundation and its Community of Practice, building on the European Green Deal and the EU’s Strategy for Data. GREAT plans to implement the GDDS blueprint technical architecture and the Data Space implementation roadmap for the Green Deal Data Space.
