Next Generation Data Infrastructure for Europe

Evaluating the use of Gaia-X federation services for sharing geospatial data in heterogeneous cloud environments

Gaia-X is a multinational project of European Member States, in line with the European Data Strategy and co-funded by the European Commission, that supports the development of European Data Spaces by piloting architectural concepts, governance mechanisms, best practices and tools for data sharing and federation of cloud services. 52°North is an active institutional member of Gaia-X AISBL, the coordinating body of the Gaia-X Initiative.

One of the key drivers behind Gaia-X is the need for data sovereignty, i.e., the ability to control what happens to data when it is shared and processed in cloud environments within and across data spaces. Federation services (GFSX) are used to manage identities and verifiable credentials of participants, to conclude smart contracts, and to manage trust based on common policies and a labeling framework.

In this project, 52°North explored the architectural patterns of Gaia-X and maped them to the concepts, technologies, and workflows used to share spatial data and spatial data services in Spatial Information Infrastructures.

52°North completed the project in 2023 by designing and implementing a technical prototype to demonstrate how an ArcGIS Enterprise-based Feature Service can be published as a Gaia-X service offering. This involved not only the creation of Gaia-X compliant self-descriptions, but also experimentation with different Gaia-X and data space implementations such as Pontus-X and the Mobility Data Space. These technical activities were complemented by a presentation at the European Esri Developer Summit and the writing of the final project report.

con terra GmbH, Germany

Esri, USA