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| HOW TO SELECT THE MOST APPROPRIATE STANDARDS |
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| STANDARDS FOR A DATA SPACE? |
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| What is the problem? |
Although standards are widely recognised as key building blocks for interoperability andefficient data sharing in common European data spaces, the choice of which reference standard to use for concrete data and service provision, is often performed without the necessary considerations. Incorrect standard selectionmay seriously hamper data-sharing processes and ultimately undermine the success of the data space as a whole. Non-optimal standards may be chosen for a set of different reasons such asthe number of available standards, which, even acrossa singledomain, could be very high. Standards with similar scope and provisions are often created by different organisations; in other cases, they overlap.Also, some standards exist but they have not beenfully adopted by a significant user base and/or there is a lack of mature software support for them. Finally, when standards remain at a draft stage for a long time yet are already used in practice, changes in the standard that is finally released can eventually break existing implementations. | Div |
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| For a transport-related project, a business company needs to perform machine-learning analyses to evaluate the accessibility to the green areas located across districts within a city. When exploring and collecting available data, the company notices a high degree of fragmentation in terms of standards currently used for data encoding and sharing. The datasets found are encoded in different formats, including non-standard formats, as well as multiple standardised formats historically used by different communities, which highly overlap in scope but follow different data models; all of this makes “extract, transform, load” (ETL) conversion from one standard to the others impossible in some cases. In addition, one of the standards used for API-based data sharing is new and software tools, which are able to retrieve and consume the data directly, do not yet exist. |
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| Proposed Solutions |
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The selection of standards to be used for encoding and exchanging data within data spaces is crucial and requiressignificant attention. Selection should prioritise well-known standards adopted by global communities, developed and released by established, trusted international standardsdevelopment organisations (SDOs) through a governance process involving several, diverse stakeholders, possibly including the public sector, the private sector and academia. A notable example from the geospatial domain is the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international standardisation body in existence since 1994 and currently numbering500+ members from around the world. Cross-domain standardisation bodies include,on the other hand,the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the latter focusing on web-based data exchange. The way in which standards are created should also be analysed in order to prioritise those developed in a participative, agile and collaborative way through the involvement of domain-specific experts and early adopters, (e.g.,workshops/hackathons),and use of collaborative online platforms (e.g., based on Git) to co-create content. This ensures that, once adopted, the standards are implementable. Finally, the maturity of standards should be considered, avoiding ones that are still in the draft stage or not yet published,giving preference to standards featuring a large user base with several implementations already available and a strong support for existing software tools. A notable exception to all these criteria is represented by so-called “de facto” standards, i.e. standards that have never been officially endorsed but whose usage and software support has become mainstream over several years. These should be given prominent consideration as a working alternative to formal standards endorsed and governed by SDOs. |
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| Selected resources |
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| - Kotsev, A., Minghini, M., Cetl, V., Penninga, F., Robbrecht, J. and Lutz, M., INSPIRE - A Public Sector Contribution to the European Green Deal Data Space, EUR 30832 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021, doi:10.2760/8563, JRC126319.
- International Organization for Standardization (ISO): https://www.iso.org
- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): https://www.w3.org
- Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC): https://www.ogc.org
DOWNLOAD PDF
HOW To's_Technical_Standards.pdf |
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| Recommendations |
- Data providers
- Monitor the process of standard development and encourage appropriate, active participation
- Consider the inclusion of standards in data-sharing practices “by design”
- Join technical committees of standardisation bodies
- Modernise existing implementations that rely on standards which are outdated, inefficient, or unsupported by software implementations, in favour of modern, more efficient standards featuring high community and software support
- Make use of validation services to test the actual compliance with reference standards
- Data users
- Contribute to the development/evolution of standards
- Test the implementation of standards in their own use cases
- Provide feedback to standardisation bodies on the advantages and disadvantages in the adoption of standards, in particular informing about obstacles and bottlenecks
- Data intermediaries
- Consider funding the development/update of standards
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| Disclaimer: The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. |
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