Designing a Decentralized Federation Layer for Metadata Exchange in Dataspaces

Project description

In urban societies, data has become a key resource for innovation, policymaking, and societal development. Cities continuously generate data related to domains such as mobility, energy use, environmental monitoring, and public services. While this data offers significant potential for analysis and reuse, it is typically distributed across independently managed organizations and systems. As a result, discovering and combining relevant datasets remains complex.

To address these challenges, the European Commission promotes the development of dataspaces. Dataspaces are decentralized environments in which organizations can share data while retaining control over their own resources. Rather than exchanging raw data, dataspaces primarily rely on metadata to describe available datasets, their provenance, and the conditions under which they can be accessed. This approach enables data discovery and reuse across organizational boundaries without requiring central ownership of the underlying data.

Context

European Dataspaces

Results

A Paper that analyses existing architectures and a proposal for an alternative federation-layer architecture for dataspaces.