In today’s data-driven world, seamlessly retrieving and publishing data across various platforms and systems is crucial. CyclOps project highlights the significance of interoperability in the context of data spaces. Let’s explore why interoperability is so vital.
Understanding Data Spaces and Interoperability
Data spaces are virtual environments where multiple stakeholders can share and access data securely and efficiently in a very trustful way. Trust in the identity, the control of the access to the data assets, the real payment of these assets and the secure data transmission. In this context, interoperability refers to the ability of different systems, applications, and data formats to work together seamlessly.
The CyclOps Approach to Interoperability
The European Interoperability Framework defines four interoperability levels and includes some interesting recommendations. It focuses on public administrations, but its technical recommendations are useful in other sectors.
Two examples of their recommendations include:
“Use of open specifications, where available, to ensure technical interoperability when establishing European public services.”
“Perception of data and information as a public asset that should be appropriately generated, collected, managed, shared, protected and preserved.”
CyclOps will focus mostly on the two of these levels, semantic and technical. It becomes especially relevant when interacting with data spaces. Once all the onboarding requirements to participate in a data space have been met, interoperability issues will arise.
Some key aspects of their approach include:
- Semantic Interoperability: Focusing on the meaning of data to enable accurate interpretation between the suppliers of data and the CyclOps’ users. It also means that both publishers and consumers of data will need to understand the meaning of the different elements of the data assets we are interacting with.
- Technical Infrastructure: Once understanding the content of the data assets, a shared technical format and protocol is necessary to move the information from the source to the consumer.
CyclOps will provide facilities to perform these tasks and has designed a technical architecture to cope with this.
Challenges and Future Directions
While the benefits of interoperability when interacting with data spaces are clear, achieving them present challenges such as:
- Real implementation of the interaction with the different data spaces and their different onboarding procedures and requirements.
- Completion of the semantic information to share and gather meaningful data from data spaces.
- Simplification of the interaction of the CyclOps users to access data assets from data spaces.
These tasks will be addressed during the next months, and the corresponding technical solutions will be made available soon.
