Press releases

Across the economy, companies are using digital technologies to pivot into innovative services, accelerate growth, and transform business processes. Data assets play an important role in this modern economy. To share this data, new technology is needed that supports openness, interoperability, extensibility, sovereignty and transparency. The Eclipse Dataspace Connector is that technology. The open-source project is supported by Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST, Daimler TSS, BMW Group, Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, SAP, ZF Friedrichshafen and GAIA-X AISBL as well as the International Data Spaces Association.

The competitiveness of literally all industries as well as societal prosperity in Europe require portability and interoperability of and sovereignty over data. This is the goal of Gaia-X AISBL. The association has now elected its board of directors during an extraordinary general meeting. Prof.

It is the largest project in the automotive industry related to future production concepts: the foundation of the association "Catena-X". It aims to offer soft-ware services based on International Data Spaces (IDS) and Gaia-X, which enable a trustworthy data exchange between all actors in the automotive industry - from the first supplier stage to the OEM. Founding members of this alliance for secure data exchange are ARENA2036, BASF SE, BMW AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (German Aerospace Center), German Edge Cloud GmbH & Co, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, ISTOS GmbH, Merce-des-Benz AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, SAP SE, Schaeffler AG, Siemens AG, SupplyOn AG, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Volkswagen AG and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft e.V.. Prof. Dr. Boris Otto, Director at the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST and board member of Gaia-X, European Association for Data and Cloud, AISBL and the Inter-national Data Spaces Association (IDSA), was elected vice-chairman of the board of Catena-X e.V..

The Dataspace Connector (DSC) enables companies to easily get started with trusted data exchange using the International Data Spaces (IDS) and GAIA-X. The implementation concept of the open source software has been successfully tested in December 2020 according to the certification criteria with "IDS-ready" of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA). Interested parties can view the source code directly via Github, use it and further develop it together with the Community. The Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Internet Technologies CCIT will show the Dataspace Connector at the digital Hannover Messe (#HM21) from April 12 to 16, 2021.

How can cities and municipal enterprises use urban data efficiently, transparently and profitably? With the "Daten-Kompetenzzentrum für Städte und Regionen DKSR” (Data Competence Center for Cities and Regions), a project of the Fraunhofer Morgenstadt Initiative has been accompanied to spin-off at the beginning of the year. DKSR uses an open-source approach to help municipalities find municipal data, retrieve it in a structured way and share it securely.

Sovereign data exchange is becoming increasingly important for companies as part of their business model. A basis for this secure data exchange is now provided by the "Dataspace Connector" (DSC) as open source software. The DSC implementation concept developed by Fraunhofer ISST has been successfully tested according to the certification criteria with "IDS-ready" of the International Data Spaces Association (IDS) since December 3, 2020. Thus, the DSC fulfills the security requirements and all functionalities required by the International Data Spaces (IDS) to trustworthily share data with others while ensuring data sovereignty.

“We are creating a next generation data ecosystem for Europe with a global aspiration”, said Hubert Tardieu, Interim CEO of GAIA-X AISBL (in incorporation). Of the nearly 180 organisations of GAIA-X today, founding members and organisations which have applied to become Day 1 members, more than 150 are European organisations and companies, representing a variety of 15 European countries. Today, some 4.000 participants from EU Member States and around the world joined Peter Altmaier, German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of Economics, Finance and Recovery, and Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, in a virtual conference to celebrate the growth of the project. Together, they discussed the role of the European data ecosystem GAIA-X as a driver for innovation and business models in Europe, and looked at the road ahead.