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What is Gaia-X

Home » What is Gaia-X

It enables a federated and secure data infrastructure, whereby data are shared, with users retaining control over their data access and usage.  It enables the creation of links between many cloud service providers in a wider, transparent and fair ecosystem to drive the European Data economy of tomorrow.

Gaia-X is

  • A non-profit association in which its members define the Gaia-X architecture & rules
  • Gaia-X makes and supports others to make open source implementations of its specifications
  • A qualification authority for the Gaia-X Label, including the Basic Conformity

Gaia-X is Not

  • A formal standardisation body
  • A SW or HW product or cloud platform
  • A runtime implementation of any Gaia-X service

Gaia-X vs. Association

  • Gaia-X project is driven by the Association
  • Gaia-X architecture is developed by the Association members
  • Gaia-X services will not be operated by the Association

Vision & Mission

Vision: Enable trusted decentralised digital ecosystems.

Mission: Creating the de facto standard aligned with EU values by developing a set of policies, rules, specifications and a verification framework.

Please check the vision strategy publication here.

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Data Spaces: What are they?

The term ‘data space’ refers to a type of data relationship between trusted partners who adhere to the same high level standards and guidelines in relation to data storage and sharing within one or many Vertical Ecosystems.

A critical aspect of the data space notion is that data are not stored centrally, but rather at the source. Thus, they are only transferred through semantic interoperability as necessary

A data space is the sum of all its participants, which may be data providers, users and intermediaries. Data spaces can be nested and overlapping. For instance, a data provider can participate in several data spaces all at once.

Each Data Space provides specific data. Thereby, it forms a solid ground for one or many ecosystems. The software required to implement data spaces runs on cloud/edge cloud infrastructures.

Data spaces objectives and deliverables within Gaia-X

The main objective of Gaia-X is to create the conditions for an outburst of data within the European market. Key to this is the creation of  data spaces, which are the digital representation of existing physical or natural or industrial or social ecosystems. In a data space, several actors belonging to the same value chain (all suppliers and oem in a supply chain, all public and private transportation in a smart city, all hospitals and laboratories in a healthcare, and so forth) federate each other to exchange data. Given the data space create services and insights that can only be achieved through the federation of the multiple actors, every single actor earns a value in participating to the federation that it could not achieve using its data only.

Gaia-X aims to develop data space projects to create an economy of data in several domains, from private to public sector. Through data space projects, Gaia-X will be developed in the market and Gaia-X services will be made available through marketplaces restricted to the federation participants or open to the outside of the federation.

The Gaia-X Association enables the creation of data spaces through the work of the regional hubs. Each hub has the objective to focus on its regional strategic data spaces, and develop concrete business cases creating consortia of member companies around them.

Gaia-X enabled data spaces allow for:

  • scaling individual solutions to address new customers
  • extending existing solutions with new value propositions
  • combine existing solutions to enable collaborations in ecosystems.

Data spaces can be industry-specific or cross-industries, they can involve multiple player within a territory or across territories, and provide for the only way to reduce physical barriers, reduce time to market, leverage the distributed intelligence and create additional value for all, large and small players, users and providers of technology.

Through data space creation, Europe can leverage the most accessible and highest quality raw material that can reinforce our economy by winning the battle of competitivity in the digital era: high quality data. From automotive to healthcare, agriculture to education, transportation,  energy or finance, the European processes, legislation, and industrial ecosystem feature by far the highest complexity and quality, and therefore are the way to win the battle to competitivity in the creation of high quality digital products and services.