Glossary
AISBL
The Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL (french: association sans but lucrative) is a non-profit association that represents the members of Gaia-X and promotes international cooperation. It is developing the legal framework of Gaia-X and ensures the availability of necessary services. Read more
Architecture of Standards (AoS)
The Architecture of Standards defines a target for Gaia-X by analysing and integrating already existing standards for data, sover¬eignty and infrastructure components as well as which standards are supported. Read more
Community
Gaia-X promotes and supports an open source software community in which everyone can participate. The community – consisting of users and providers – works together on defined open work packages. Read more
Data Infrastructure
Data infrastructure refers to a federated technical infrastructure, consisting of components and services that make it possible to access data and to store, exchange and use it according to predefined rules.
Data Ecosystem
A Data Ecosystem is a loose set of interacting actors that directly or indirectly consume, produce, or provide data and other related resources.
Data Sovereignty
Data Sovereignty can be defined as a natural person’s or corporate entity’s capability of being entirely self-determined with regard to its data.
Data Space
A Data Space is a virtual data integration concept defined as a set of participants and a set of relationships among them, where parti¬cipants provide their data resources and computing services. Data Spaces have following design principles: a) data resides in its sources; b) only semantic integration of data and no common data schema; c) nesting and overlaps are possible; d) spontaneous networking of data, data visiting and coexistence of data are enabled. Within one Data Ecosystem, several Data Spaces can emerge. Read more
Digital Ecosystem
A digital ecosystem is the network of developers, providers and users of digital products and services, combined with transparency, broad access and a vibrant process of interchange. Such a system thus serves as a crucial foundation for European growth, digital innovation and new business models.
Digital Sovereignty
Digital Sovereignty is the power to make decisions about how digital processes, infrastructures and the movement of data are structured, built and managed.
Domain
The members of the Gaia-X Hubs are organised in several domain-specific working groups on a national level. Each domain is managed by a domain ambassador who coordinates the activities within the respective working group. The domains focus on collecting, analysing and evaluating use cases and defining domain-specific and cross-domain requirements. These form the basis for the growth of data infrastructures.
Federation Services
The central Gaia-X Federation Services are needed to start a concrete Gaia-X operation, to establish the Gaia-X ecosystem on this basis and to enable the coordinated provision of Infrastructure Services, Interconnection Services and Dataspace Services. Read more
Gaia-X Ecosystem
The Gaia-X Ecosystem consists of the entirety of all individual ecosystems that use the Gaia-X Architecture and conform to Gaia-X re¬quirements. Several individual ecosystems may exist that orchestrate themselves, use the Gaia-X Architecture and may or may not use the Gaia-X Federation Services open source software.
Gaia-X Identifier
One unique attribute used to identify an entity within the Gaia-X context and following Gaia-X format.
Gaia-X Portal
The Gaia-X Portal is a Federation Service to support Participants in interacting with central Federation Service functions via a graphical user interface.
Hub
The Gaia-X Hubs give users a voice at the national level. They develop ecosystems, bundle national initiatives and are the central contact point for interested parties in the respective country. A Hub focuses on the exchange with other regional Gaia-X Hubs in Europe and worldwide in order to ensure international alignment regarding their activities, the definition of requirements and the identification of regulatory hurdles. Read more
Interoperability
Interoperability means that different information systems, devices and applications (systems) can access, exchange, integrate and use data in a coordinated way within and across organisational, regional and national borders.
Node
A Gaia-X Node is a compute and storage resource. Nodes are generic in the sense that different Services can be deployed on them. Nodes have a known certification level and a geographic location.
Portability
Portability means that a software can be used in different operating systems. When software with the same functionality is produced for several computing platforms, portability is the key issue for development cost reduction.
Privacy by Design
Privacy by Design means that data protection is already considered during the design and development of software and hardware for data processing. By means of user-friendly pre-settings, only data that are necessary for the respective processing purpose are to be collected. This is to limit interference with the protective rights of the users concerned.
Provider
Organisation or entity responsible for making a Service/Node available to the Gaia-X ecosystem.
Security by Design
Security by Design means that security requirements for software and hardware are already considered during the development phase of a product to prevent later security gaps.
Technical Architecture
The Technical Architecture describes the overall concept and its components of how to achieve the goals of Gaia-X. The Technical Committee releases information about the current working status via the Technical Architecture Paper.
Use Case
A Gaia-X Use Case is a potential application for cross-sector or industry-specific innovation, which makes use of and is based on the Gaia-X Federation Services. Various Use Cases from different domains submitted in the Gaia-X Hubs demonstrate the advantages of a data infrastructure. They demonstrate the need as well as the dependencies and the added value of the ecosystem and describe benefits for (cross-)domain exchange supported by Gaia-X. In addition, use cases help to identify domain-specific and cross-domain requirements. These are incorporated into the development of Gaia-X. Read more
User
A user can be an organization, entity or person, that participates in the Gaia-X ecosystem. In particular, it makes use of Services provided by Gaia-X when connecting their application in the ecosystem.
Working Groups
The Working Groups are located within the AISBL’s Technical Committee. They deal with defined tasks. Only members of the AISBL can participate in the Working Groups. Read more
Work Packages
The open Work Packages deal with defined tasks and follow a similar working mode as the permanent Working Groups. All participants of Gaia-X can contribute to the open work packages. Deliverables of them can be position papers, technical evaluations, whitepapers, proposals etc. Read more