PRINCIPLES, REQUIREMENTS AND FEATURES OF A DATA SPACE
The high-level and overarching vision defined for common European data spaces is to establish a single market for data in the EU, thus bringing about many economic, societal and environmental benefits. In addition, the EU policy initiatives dedicated to data-driven innovation strongly signal that data sharing practices should be ethical, trustworthy and based on common societal values. For this to be achieved, the rules for accessing, using and sharing data must be fair, clear and practicable.
There are several key principles for European data sharing (below) as set out in relevant EU policy and legislative documents concerning common European data spaces. Similar principles are also outlined in the “European declaration on digital rights and principles” that was published in 2022. Combined, such principles constitute the mind-set for sharing data in Europe based on shared societal values and should be propagated throughout a data value chain (i.e., the full data lifecycle from collection to analysis and usage).
CHARACTERISTICS OF DATA SPACES
Below is an example for the instance of the European Green Deal data space, which aims to exploit the major potential of data in support of the Green Deal priority actions on climate change, circular economy, zero-pollution, biodiversity, deforestation and compliance assurance.
The vision of this data space is to ensure the effective and efficient reuse of heterogeneous data in support of all stages of environmental policies, to meet the objectives of the European Green Deal. This vision is guided by the same data sharing principles outlined above.
The requirements for the European Green Deal data space include, among others, to harmonise, document and expose geospatial environmental data in accordance with the legal provisions, to preserve privacy when reusing citizen-generated data on the environment, and to provide licensing information alongside the data to ensure their reusability.
The features that implement such requirements may include e.g., an infrastructure (such as GAIA-X) for federating European data sharing infrastructures, aligned with societal values and existing legal frameworks; a validation service to ensure adherence of data encoding and sharing provisions to reference/legal standards; and a common licensing framework to standardise data access and use conditions.
SECTOR-SPECIFIC DATA SPACES
In the European strategy for data, the European Commission undertakes to promote the development of EU-wide common, interoperable data spaces in strategic economic sectors and domains of public interest. A cross-cutting objective is to support the creation of data pools for big data analytics and machine learning, in a manner compliant with relevant legislation.
Example of a Health Data Space*
The initial common European data spaces are described as follows:
Industrial data space: to support the competitiveness and performance of the EU’s industry
Green Deal data space: to use the major potential of data in support of the Green Deal priority actions on issues such as climate change, circular economy, pollution, biodiversity, and deforestation
Mobility data space: to position Europe at the forefront of the development of an intelligent transport system
Health data space: essential for advances in preventing, detecting and treating diseases as well as for informed, evidence-based decisions to improve the healthcare systems
Financial data space: to stimulate innovation, market transparency, sustainable finance, as well as access to finance for European businesses and a more integrated market
Energy data space: to promote a stronger availability and cross-sector sharing of data, in a customer-centric, secure and trustworthy manner
Agriculture data space: to enhance the sustainability performance and competitiveness of the agricultural sector through the processing and analysis of It will consider the experience of the stakeholder-led
Public Administration data space: to improve transparency and accountability of public spending and spending quality, fighting corruption, both at EU and national level
Skills data space: to reduce the skills mismatches between the education and training systems and the labour market needs
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC): provides the basis for a science, research and innovation data space that will bring together data from research and deployment programmes and that will be connected and fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces. It provides seamless access and reliable re-use of research data to European researchers, innovators, companies and citizens through a trusted and open distributed data environment and related services.
Suggested Section: Technical Requirements
Understand what are the Technical Requirements needed for building a data space
*Source: Communication from the European Commission to the European Parliament and the Council, ‘A European Health Data Space: harnessing the power of health data for people, patients and innovation’ (2022)