From Theory to Practice: Demonstrators of FAIR Data Spaces Across Different Sectors
Nikolaus Glombiewski, Zeyd Boukhers, Christian Beilschmidt, Johannes Drönner, Michael Mattig, Artur Piet, Robert Pietrzynski, Mehrshad Jaberansary, Macedo Maia, Sebastian Beyvers, Yeliz Üçer Yediel, Muhammad Hamza Akhtar, Heiner Oberkampf, Jonathan Hartman, Bernhard Seeger, Christoph Lange
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling secure, FAIR-compliant data exchange between industry and research organizations while preserving data ownership and governance. It presents the FAIR Data Spaces program as a unifying framework that combines cloud-native architectures, metadata management, data governance, and IAM to realize sovereign data sharing. Eight demonstrators across health, biodiversity, and engineering illustrate practical deployments from research-scale infrastructures to industry-ready cloud environments, including PADME, ACCURIDS, Geo Engine, and BatCAT-based workflows. The findings underscore the viability of cross-domain data spaces under a common legal/ethical framework and lay groundwork for scalable integration of B2B and RDI data spaces.
Abstract
The principles of data spaces for sovereign data exchange across trusted organizations have so far mainly been adopted in business-to-business settings, and recently scaled to cloud environments. Meanwhile, research organizations have established distributed research data infrastructures, respecting the principle that data must be FAIR, i.e., findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. For mutual benefit of these two communities, the FAIR Data Spaces project aims to connect them towards the vision of a common, cloud-based data space for industry and research. Thus, the project establishes a common legal and ethical framework, common technical building blocks, and it demonstrates the orchestration of multiple building blocks in self-contained settings addressing a diverse range of use cases in domains including health, biodiversity, and engineering. This paper gives a summary of all demonstrators, ranging from research data infrastructures scaled to industry-ready cloud environments to work in progress on building bridges between operational business-to-business data spaces and research data infrastructures.