Speakers
Description
This practical demonstration will showcase how a real, operational data space works in practice and how its core principles (data sovereignty, trust, security, interoperability and decentralized governance) are translated into concrete technical mechanisms.
The demonstration is based on Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC), an open-source framework for building sovereign and interoperable data spaces. Communication between participants is based on the Dataspace Protocol (DSP), which defines standardized interactions for data discovery, contract negotiation and data transfer between independent connectors. This protocol-based approach enables interoperability beyond a particular connector implementation, allowing different organisations and technology providers to participate in the same data space.
Using the EDC-based connector interfaces, we will follow the main stages of a data asset life cycle: its description and publication by a data provider, discovery by another participant through a federated catalogue, definition and negotiation of access conditions, contract establishment, and subsequent controlled data transfer. DCAT-based catalogues provide a common model for describing datasets, distributions and data services, facilitating federated discovery across organisations.
The demonstration will show how data can remain under the control of the providing organisation while still being discoverable and accessible to authorised participants. Rather than transferring control of the data to a central platform, providers define the policies under which their assets can be discovered, accessed and exchanged. These policies are associated with data offers and negotiated between participants before any transfer takes place, illustrating how data sovereignty can be implemented through machine-readable policies and decentralized contract negotiation.
Trust between participants is another fundamental component. Cryptographically Verifiable Credentials (VCs) allow trusted issuers to attest properties of an organisation, such as its membership in the data space or its entitlement to access a particular class of resources. Connectors can validate these claims before exposing protected data or accepting a transaction.
Finally, the demonstration will address semantic interoperability. While DSP enables technical interaction and DCAT enables participants to describe and discover data assets using a common model, understanding and reusing the data itself requires shared semantics. OneHealth DataSpace incorporates Semantic Treehouse to manage and publish shared vocabularies, ontologies, application profiles and data schemas. This semantic layer is particularly relevant in One Health, where heterogeneous data originating from different organisations and disciplines must be interpreted consistently before it can be exploited.
The workflow will therefore illustrate several complementary levels of interoperability and trust: DSP provides a common protocol for connector-to-connector interaction; DCAT provides a common model for describing and discovering data assets; Verifiable Credentials provide machine-verifiable assertions about participants; ODRL policy negotiation controls the conditions under which data can be accessed; and Semantic Treehouse common vocabularies and semantic models allow participants to interpret the exchanged information consistently.
Together, these mechanisms provide the technical foundations for a data space in which independent organisations can discover and exchange data securely while preserving control over their own resources. The demonstration will thus move from the abstract concepts of sovereignty, trust, federation and interoperability to their practical implementation in a working data space.