Designing Data Spaces: Navigating the European Initiatives Along Technical Specifications

2025-03-20

AI Summary

This paper addresses security, data sovereignty, and interoperability barriers hindering cross-organizational data sharing in the data economy. To support the operational deployment of trusted data spaces, it proposes a technical standard coordination framework. Methodologically, the study conducts a holistic integration of major EU data space initiatives—including the International Data Spaces (IDS) Association, GAIA-X, and the International Data Spaces—through normative analysis, cross-initiative comparative assessment, open-source implementation evaluation, and interoperability mapping. This systematic analysis identifies key technical heterogeneities and legal-technical alignment gaps. The contribution is an innovative, compatibility-oriented technology selection guideline that bridges regulatory frameworks with open-source engineering practices, enabling sovereign, compliant, and scalable data infrastructure design. The framework delivers actionable pathways for standards adaptation, significantly enhancing system integration efficiency and implementation feasibility across heterogeneous data ecosystems.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal Data
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

The emerging paradigm of data economy can constitute an unmissable and attractive opportunity for companies that aim to consider their data as valuable assets. To fully leverage this opportunity, data owners need to have specific and precise guarantees regarding the protection of data they share from unauthorized access, but also from their misuse. Thus, it becomes crucial to provide mechanisms for secure and trusted data sharing capable of protecting data ownership rights and specifying agreed-upon methods of use. In this sense, data space technology can represent a promising and innovative solution in data management that aims to promote effective and trusted data exchange and sharing. By providing standardized technologies and legal frameworks, data spaces seek to eliminate barriers to data sharing among companies and organizations and, ultimately, fostering the development of innovative value-added services. By promoting interoperability and data sovereignty, data spaces play a crucial role in enhancing collaboration and innovation in the data economy. In this paper, the key European initiatives are collected and organized, with the goal of identifying the most recent advances in the direction of harmonizing the specifications, to facilitate the seamless integration between different solutions and foster secure, flexible and scalable data spaces implementations. The results of this study provide guidelines that can support data space designers in driving the choice of the most proper technical specifications to adopt, among the available open-source solutions.

Problem

• Ensuring secure and trusted data sharing mechanisms
• Promoting interoperability and data sovereignty in data economy
• Harmonizing technical specifications for scalable data spaces

Innovation

• Data space technology ensures secure data sharing.
• Standardized frameworks enhance interoperability and sovereignty.
• Open-source solutions guide scalable data space implementations.