Deploying & Exchanging Data with SIMPL Dataspaces
AI & Data
Semester programme:Open Learning - Main
Research group:Interaction Design
Project group members:Iskren Aleksandrov
Victor Maftei
Kristiyan Lozanov
Thomas Claessens
Angel Nikolov
Project description
Main question: How can the SIMPL framework be deployed and used to facilitate data transfer?
SIMPL is an open-source EU middleware platform for secure, sovereign data exchange across European data spaces, but it is still mid-development with sparse documentation, where a single faulty service can break the whole system. The challenge was to stand up a complete self-hosted SIMPL instance on Kubernetes, get participants exchanging data through it, and feed honest technical advice back to the SIMPL developers and the CitizenCity project.
Context
The project sits within CitizenCity, a European-funded initiative that develops digital solutions to make cities more livable, sustainable, and inclusive across three real-life pilot cities. A central idea of CitizenCity is the responsible, transparent, and secure sharing of data between cities, organisations, and citizens to improve public services and involve residents in decision-making.
The domain is public-sector / smart-city data sharing, realised through the European Common Data Spaces concept: shared digital infrastructure where organisations exchange data under clearly defined rules, with technical interoperability and legal trust built in. SIMPL is the middleware that makes this possible, giving data providers full control over who accesses their data. The client is the Lectorate Interaction Design (IXD) at Fontys ICT, with the work positioned as applied research toward a future production deployment.
Results
The headline outcome is a working, self-hosted SIMPL deployment on Kubernetes, running on a Fontys EduCloud environment and managed through GitOps (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD).
Validation:
The deployment was demonstrated live to coaches and stakeholders rather than as raw configuration, supported by automated tests and curated ArgoCD/EduCloud views.
Deliverables:
a deployed SIMPL data space, runbooks documenting the EduCloud setup, an infrastructure analysis, mock services to test data transfer, and an advisory report for the SIMPL/CitizenCity stakeholders.
TRL positioning:
SIMPL itself is pre-production. This work validated it in a realistic, relevant environment (self-hosted cluster, monitoring, repeatable deployment), placing the outcome at roughly TRL 5 – technology validated in a relevant environment, with elements moving toward TRL 6 as data-transfer scenarios are demonstrated.
About the project group
A five-person Open Learning group blending senior and junior profiles: two Semester 6 students (Infrastructure and Business/Organisational Processes, both level 3) and three Semester 4 students (Smart Mobile and two Infrastructure level 2). The group worked across a ~20-week semester, organised into three parallel tracks: infrastructure & deployment, data exchange, and business & governance.