Press releases

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.

In order to strengthen the competitiveness of the European economy by building a secure cross-sector data infrastructure based on European values, Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier and his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire presented the main features of the technical architecture and organizational structure of GAIA-X on June 4.

A total of twenty-two founding members today officially started the development of a European data infrastructure "GAIA-X". The aim of the infrastructure is to raise and use the data treasure available in European companies. Data availability, interoperability, portability, data sovereignty and transparency are important aspects for the development and operation of this infrastructure.

Anyone who operates industrial plants wants to avoid downtime. Accordingly, maintenance intervals should be adapted to the actual need to check the plant. For this purpose, data must be exchanged between the plant operator and the plant manufacturer. This process is only one example of many of the necessity of inter-company data exchange. The Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST has developed an IoT architecture that integrates the data of such a company process into a "Shared Digital Twin". This data can be shared with other companies on the basis of connectors, whereby the company providing the data always retains control over the use of the data.