Data space experts gathered in The Hague

Data space experts gathered in The Hague

A first-ever Data Spaces Symposium was organized in The Hague between the 21st and the 23rd of March 2023. The event attracted 700 visitors and 150 experts appearing on 5 stages. It featured the Annual Conference of the Data Spaces Support Centre and a Data Spaces Deep-Dive Day bringing together many enthusiastic individuals representing businesses and various public organizations.

VTT invested strongly and participated with 10 experts representing the technical, legal as well as business aspects of the data spaces field. This level of engagement reflects the variety of skills that are needed to boost the European data economy. Data spaces, by offering trusted and scalable ways to share data, will have a broad effect on our society. They will transform the way we collaborate, make business, share new business goals and behave in a society.

We can draw four conclusions from the event:

Public effort and funding are important to ignite the data economy

Various presentations and discussions in the symposium revealed a wide consensus on the fact that the development of data spaces requires regulation and public effort. Regulation is needed to establish rules for a fair data economy and to build trust in data sharing, to mention but the most obvious benefit. Consequently, regulation provides a framework for companies to pursue partnerships and investments, or R&D prospects, for instance, that would otherwise not emerge. While the European Data Strategy laid the foundation for European Data Spaces, both general (notably the Data Act and the Data Governance Act) and domain-specific (like in the case of health data) regulation are needed. New regulation dealing with data sharing in the field of climate change, for example, is underway.

As for publicly initiated and funded projects, they are crucial especially for identifying regulatory needs, for developing best practices in creating, managing and operating data spaces and to promote experimentation and new ways of working. We got an update on many such experiments including the Gaia-X lighthouse projects Catena-X and Mobility Data Space. Both EU and national initiatives are flourishing in many domains such as health, mobility, industry, green deal, agriculture and circular economy.

New instruments are needed to avoid fragmentation

For data spaces to work to their full potential, market players must work together and agree on many practical, legal and technical aspects. It is imperative that different data spaces share objectives and are technically compatible and that solutions can be transferred from one context to another and replicated. The Hague symposium introduced several platforms and initiatives that aim at such interoperability and portability.

The Data Spaces Business Alliance unites industry players in the search of technical convergence of their respective approaches. It brings together Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL, the Big Data Value Association (BDVA), FIWARE Foundation, and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) – and the 1000+ stakeholders they together represent. The Data Spaces Support Centre is funded by the European Commission as part of the Digital Europe Program. The organization has the purpose of defining common requirements, establishing best practices and making different technologies and standards available. It has released a Starter Kit and a Glossary to help companies with data space development. As for a third example, a Dutch initiative for coordinating data space development and sharing expertise was unveiled at the Hague symposium: The Centre of Excellence for Data Sharing and Cloud or CoE-DSC.

In addition to organizations, also methodological instruments, such as the IDSA Rule Book, are developed to ensure synergies and interoperability between data spaces.

SMEs have a golden opportunity

As the importance of having data spaces that can work together increases, there will be a growing demand for practical and hands-on services. It is a golden opportunity for many small and medium-sized enterprises. The Hague symposium featured a small exhibition area where such companies showcased their services related to data ecosystems. These services can take different forms, such as providing data spaces as a service or creating customized data spaces based on specific needs. In any case, what SMEs can offer is particularly valuable: they can make it easy to establish and operate a data space.

Experimentation plays a crucial role in developing new tools and services, thereby creating new opportunities for service providers. This can be especially important in situations where different sectors need to collaborate, as it can be challenging to navigate the complexities of data governance in such cases.

The data space community is thriving

As a final conclusion from the three-day event, we are pleased to note that the data space community is thriving. Indeed, the workshops that took place on the third day were met with enthusiasm. How to protect data providers from misuse and establish trust was perhaps the most burning topic. Specifically regarding individuals’ personal data, it was agreed that provisions related to sharing it should be included in the blueprint of data spaces from the very beginning. It is something of concern for all and not only dedicated organizations like MyData.

As the data economy penetrates the society, it is crucial to consider a variety of perspectives and voices to ensure its fairness and to safeguard data sovereignty, the owners’ right to control their data. We hope to see even more interdisciplinary considerations and initiatives. We also hope to see new ways of working together with the purpose of identifying benefits, supporting new players, building solutions and technologies and setting standards for interoperable systems.

Events like the Data Spaces Symposium serve as ideal platforms for co-creating the future of the data economy.

Author

Tuomo Tuikka
Data space experts gathered in The Hague

Data space for agriculture and robots in FlexiGroBots project

Agriculture and food production are promising industries for experimenting with data sharing and data space. Food, its origin and the sustainability, cleanliness and quality of its production are matters of great interest to consumers. And what interests the consumer also interests the production chain. On the other hand, the quality of the products and the provability of the quality affects the price that can be obtained from it, and thus it has a direct impact on the  primary producers as well. Thirdly, the price of food is kept lower with the help of public subsidies, which in turn requires the transparency of the entire production towards the subsidy process. Producing information from farms to consumers is not a simple task. The entire chain is sensitive to costs, and on the other hand, the data itself is a competitive factor and therefore confidential.

The EU-funded FlexiGroBots project develops the digitization of agriculture through robotics, artificial intelligence, and the data economy. In the Finnish pilot of the project we have developed a prototype of a data space based on the IDSA architecture and components of VTT’s Data Spaces Innovation Lab, which allows pilot participants and their systems to exchange data without jeopardizing the ownership or confidentiality of the data.

Since the project is a research project and the technologies to be developed are at the experimental stage, the data space and its participants have taken a leap towards the future. A virtual operating model and suitable virtual participants have been developed. The model is indeed such that it could be true even today, if technologies and legislation were at a sufficient level in all respects. There are four different participants in the Finnish pilot.

  1. A farmer who grows silage and canola. The farmer controls his farm using farm management software.
  2. A robot service company that offers silage harvesting using autonomous ISOBUS-controlled tractors and weeding with an autonomous robot.
  3. A drone company that performs imaging and precision spraying flights as a service.
  4. AI service company that offers image analyses and artificial intelligence services via the Internet.

With the help of data space, companies can exchange robots’ task and result files, transfer captured images or multispectral images, map data, etc. with each other and freely form cooperation networks of their choice. With the help of IDSA, the network can be expanded, and in the project, this will be expanded to also cover other pilots in Lithuania, Serbia, and Spain. In the future, usability will be developed, especially to support the data economy better.

Author

Juha-Pekka Soininen
Data space experts gathered in The Hague

Data Value, Ease of Use, and Governance – Three Aspects to Data Spaces

Data sharing is the key for new value creation. Just imagine if you could easily know where your data is and determine how it is used. Imagine you could set the very same data into a data market just to wait for the right moment for value creation. While intriguing, this is the hardest nut to crack in data business: how value can be created?

Value thinking is extremely important when we want to understand the benefit of data sharing in an organization refitting itself to data economy. The difference from earlier, IT system development within single organizations, is that the value of data depends on how the data ecosystem is organized: who needs data, how data is related to real material flows, or services. A good example is the energy network system and its transformation to small-scale production, where production sites are numerous, even in household granularity. How can one share data between local production site and an end customer, and how to make electricity market flexible and affordable in such a case?

Data sharing technologies have existed for quite some time but tapping into a data space is a totally new aspect. A data space is a construct, which aims to provide trusted and scalable data sharing environment that has data sovereignty built into it. International Data Spaces Association provides a framework for data space development. Such technology is important as an enabler. Besides technology, however, there are key non-technical issues that affect very much how we design data spaces and how we use the technology.

The first key issue is the new era of data value via data sharing, which requires new inventions, if not even new terminology. Extraction of value in a data ecosystem is still the final frontier where no man or woman has gone before. I think understanding value is crucial to start with, or we will not see convergence of ecosystem stakeholders to common approaches.

Second requirement for data sharing is that it must be easy for the users. The point in a standard approach is that interoperability can be taken for granted and it is possible to create a scalable data space. All the complexity of the data space access, however, must be hidden from the user.

Third, although federated approach seems promising in a sense that no central player is needed, the reality will most probably lead us to new governance models. Someone needs to be aware how to embrace quality of the data and the data space, how basic services work, and be ready to respond to any challenges data space members will encounter. Much of this can be resolved with automation or even with AI, but a control room will be necessary in form of data intermediaries, service providers, or trusted data management providers in some co-op model.

I did not raise yet legal framework to the podium here, as forthcoming Data Act will be an object for another analysis. However, it is clear that data spaces address many issues in a new way and we still lack conceptual and methodological tools to work to build on recent development of technologies.

 

Author

Tuomo Tuikka