The Data Space Research Lab: Open initiative for the further development of existing Eclipse Dataspace Components from Huawei and Fraunhofer ISST

New ways for cross-border data exchange: The Data Space Research Lab is a cooperation between Huawei Technologies and Fraunhofer ISST initiated in 2023. The aim is to master the digital challenges of our time and support companies worldwide through technical innovations in the data economy.

The challenge

The focus of the Data Space Research Lab is on international cross-border data exchange from an industrial perspective, taking into account European associations such as the International Data Space Association (IDSA) and Gaia-X AISBL. Together with partners from industry and research, we are implementing international standards in the lab. Our goal is to enable new ways of sharing data. The Lab contributes significantly to international standardization and specification activities related to data interoperability when data is shared and used. The Data Space Research Lab makes a valuable contribution to anchoring joint research achievements in the global economy. This proves the direct applicability and anchoring of the research results in practice.

Our contribution

The lab offers companies in Europe, China and worldwide an innovative and product-ready infrastructure for sharing their valuable data. This enables companies to use their data for innovative business models and the associated digital transformation - a factor that is also becoming increasingly important for companies with the rise of generative AI.

The Data Space Research Lab's solutions use existing open source software (OSS) projects such as the Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC) to develop company-specific services. Fraunhofer ISST and Huawei Technologies contribute significantly to these OSS projects, promoting a common foundation for data-driven collaboration.

The components enable service providers such as independent software vendors (ISVs) to operate data spaces as a standard infrastructure technology for sharing data according to global standards and specifications.

One example is the Boot-X project running in the Data Space Research Lab, which combines available open components and new approaches for data exchange-related research issues (e.g. usage control, RAG, decentralized identity management). Boot-X aims to establish a global data space environment for cross-border data exchange. The infrastructure and technology stack provided are used to set up a complete data space or to participate in existing data spaces.

Boot-X enables the operation of real business cases and integrates existing applications from different areas. Based on a common but expandable data space infrastructure, users can therefore concentrate on their business and simply use the data space as a cloud service.

The results

The collaboration offers the opportunity to jointly advance the internationalization of the research field and improve services to best support the global market requirements of companies for data sharing and participation in data spaces.

Fraunhofer ISST and Huawei Technologies invite other industry partners to participate in joint research projects on the topic of data spaces as part of the Data Space Research Lab. The collaboration offers the opportunity to jointly advance the internationalization of the research field and improve services to best support the global market requirements of companies for data sharing and participation in data spaces.

Together with industry partners, the Data Space Research Lab team discusses new concepts and approaches, carries out Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and transforms these into solid pilot projects - either by using the previous research results or through individual new developments.

Funded research projects can also benefit from the developments in the Data Space Research Lab by using the existing results in their projects and relying on a technical infrastructure evaluated by the community. On this solid basis, they can concentrate on their valuable business cases within their project.

Partner

• Huawei Germany

Film

»Let your knowledge grow - Evaluate protected data with LLMs«

LLM-based data spaces for searching protected data - a development by Fraunhofer ISST in cooperation with Huawei using Boot-X