Consortium establishes alliance to tackle data-sharing challenges
Source: SmartCitiesWorld news team
The Data Spaces Business Alliance seeks to unlock the value of data and artificial intelligence by driving the adoption of data spaces across Europe and beyond.
A consortium of major players in the area of data and artificial intelligence are collaborating to drive the adoption of data spaces across Europe and beyond.
Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL, Big Data Value Association (BDVA), FIWARE Foundation, and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) have formed the Data Spaces Business Alliance (DSBA), which seeks to bring together the necessary industry players to realise a data-driven future in which organisations and individuals can unlock the full value of their data.
Data integration
Data spaces aim to address the challenges associated with data integration. The partners said in a statement that they are viewed as key to achieving “sovereign, interoperable and trustworthy” data-sharing across businesses and societies.
“We have proven that building data spaces is possible,” says Reinhold Achatz, chairman of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA). “Now we must do it. The Data Spaces Business Alliance has all the joint capabilities to successfully build and even run data spaces. The next step is large- scale adoption to fully realise the economical potential.
“In this alliance, we will act now and think big for the digital future that will benefit everyone.”
The practice of data-sharing is gradually growing over time but organisations often face significant barriers that prevent them from realising direct benefits. Data spaces aim to overcome these, bringing together data providers, users and intermediaries and help organisations to competitively extract value out of data also through industrial AI.
The alliance is working together in three main areas:
Technology and architecture: it will define a common reference model, based on existing architectures and models, leveraging each other’s efforts on infrastructure and implementations. This will drive interoperability by harmonising technology components and other elements.
Support: the alliance will assist existing organisations and data spaces by pooling tools, resources and expertise in a focused way. The support includes handbooks, roadmaps, individual evolution plans, access to digital innovation hubs, acceleration programmes and includes a go-to-market toolkit to make data spaces happen.
Identification and characterisation: it will establish a ‘Data Spaces Radar’ to actively scout potential data spaces. It provides a unique overview on data spaces evolution on a global level, thanks to an enormous network and unprecedented expertise. The Alliance also promotes frontrunners and identifies best practices used by them, for the benefit of all.
“The Data Spaces Business Alliance has all the joint capabilities to successfully build and even run data spaces. The next step is large- scale adoption to fully realise the economical potential”
Dario Avallone, FIWARE Foundation board of directors’ chairman, reinforced the value of this collaboration: “BDVA, FIWARE, Gaia-X, and IDSA – with long-established and renowned ecosystems in their respective fields – establish at the right point in time an alliance that realises federated data ecosystems and growing marketplaces by the implementation of data spaces in specific verticals such as health, manufacturing, finance, agriculture, utilities, mobility, tourism, the public sector, to mention but a few.”
He added that the alliance “delivers towards the goal of a seamless integration of all required components, assets and expertise that are necessary to build an end-to-end user-driven value chain”.
With more than 1,000 members combined, the Alliance’s founding organisations represent leading key industry players, associations, research organisations, innovators, and policymakers from local, national, European level, and beyond.
BDVA is an industry-driven international not-for-profit organisation with more than 230 members across Europe focused on enabling the digital transformation of the economy and society through data and artificial intelligence. FIWARE Foundation is a non-profit that drives the definition and encourages the adoption of open standards, based on open source technologies, reference architectures and over 800 smart data models.
Gaia-X is a digital ecosystem regulated…