Data spaces: More room for digital cooperation.

Professor Boris Otto: Let me explain it to you by relating it to something in everyday life. Let’s say I’m on a business trip from Dortmund to Zurich. I will be travelling with a lot different transport services. First I take a bus in Dortmund to the tram, which gets me to the main station. A train from there takes me to the airport, and so on.

It’s one mode after another…

Exactly, and it’s up to me to navigate them. I use my mobile phone to have the latest information and make sure I get from A to B. But right now, I have about 50 apps just for public transport! The situation is far from ideal.

What if all the providers I travel with shared my travel data? My airline could book a later flight for me if my train is delayed. I could check in and pay automatically. I’d have a fully coordinated travel service.

In terms of service, yes. But not in terms of how they handle my data. I don’t want to forfeit my data to a data lake, without knowing who might be able to fish it out.

No. Data spaces provide an alternative architecture that offers platform functionality, but on the basis of a dispersed platform, meaning the data is not physically integrated, so not pooled and not centrally stored.

That’s right, but it’s me who decides the conditions. I can share my data for just a single journey, for example, or link it to an offering such as the Bahncard rail card or something similar. This is the difference between the federated structure of data spaces and central platforms and results in a new balance of power.

If dispersed platforms are to work, we will need open source communities.

Professor Boris Otto

Let’s take the Mobility Data Space as an example, because it has such an interesting structure. It was founded by acatech, the German National Academy of Science and Engineering, as a non-profit organisation and is funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport. Its partners are three German states, several automotive and insurance companies, Deutsche Bahn national railway and the German postal service. It’s a syndicate or a joint venture consisting of various groups that are not only profit-oriented but also interested in serving the socio-economic interest.

Making traffic in cities more sustainable, for example. A task you cannot achieve if you are only interested in making profit.

When it comes to data spaces it’s all about the infrastructure, the foundation. Just like with the European digital ecosystem Gaia X or the International Data Spaces Initiative, we need someone to put an infrastructure in place even before knowing how it’s going to be used.

Data spaces are the foundation. Not all those in a data space have all the data they need, so they pass on, swap or sell it. The data space regulates this data economy using policies so that even the smaller players such as start-ups get access to data that a central platform would usually not pass on. This paves the way for new services and products—meaning innovative solutions for existing problems.

The idea has been around for a while. The first papers on the subject were published 15 years ago. The technology itself, however, is still n its infancy. The industry ecosystem Catena-X founded in 2021 is a network that a large part of the automotive industry uses to exchange data in a data space within a value creation network. It is currently used by manufacturers from Germany, France, the USA and Japan as well as many suppliers.

There is a host of challenges that no one can tackle alone...

Exactly, For example, let’s look at the requirements of a circular economy, and components for electric vehicles in particular. The batteries require resources that are, as we know, not obtained under ideal conditions. They are also expensive and scarce, meaning we really cannot afford for them to be disposed of as waste. We have to make sure that these components and materials can be reused in some way. In order to do this, I need data on the entire lifecycle of the battery.

My next example is the requirements of the Supply Chain Act. If you control just a quarter of value creation, you need the data of the direct suppliers, their suppliers and so on, to be able to share information and comply with the obligation of proof.

Before that can happen, there are two hurdles to overcome. The data readiness of German companies and institutions, as many of them are not yet able to provide the data we need. And then we're also missing a general grasp of open source, which data space technology is based on.

Open source is one of the most meritocratic systems I know—the more you put in, the more recognition you get from the community and the more influence you can enjoy. If you contribute a great deal, you can make a lot of decisions, too. That’s what it means, and I think that’s a really positive thing. If we want distributed platforms to work, we need open source communities. They make it possible to harness collective knowledge.