Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

The ongoing development of national and European data spaces for industry, research and public administration requires technical standards. Fraunhofer FIT contributes by transferring findings and solutions from other application domains and sectors to the target environment of the respective data spaces.

The Data Spaces Support Centre coordinated by Fraunhofer, which supports the development of the European data spaces, publishes its “Blueprint” every six months with recommendations for the development and operation of data spaces. Fraunhofer FIT particularly contributes to the definition of the technical building blocks – "Data Interoperability", "Data Sovereignty and Trust", and "Data Value Creation Enablers" – building, among others, on the DCAT-AP standard, an extensible Application Profile of the Data Catalogue Vocabulary for public data portals in Europe. In the mobility application domain, FIT played a leading role in mobilityDCAT-AP, an adaptation of DCAT-AP for national access points for mobility data. FIT is developing further domain-specific adaptations, in particular of policies for the sovereign use of data, for the German Culture Data Space (Datenraum Kultur).

Standards for business-to-business data spaces can also be derived from prior work on research data infrastructures. FIT is at the source here thanks to its long-standing involvement in the National Research Data Infrastructure NFDI and, as coordinator of the FAIR Data Spaces project, has been building the bridge from science to industry since 2021. New in 2024 is the National Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Data Economy (Mission KI). In its sub-project "FDO One", FIT is transferring the FAIR Digital Objects technology to data spaces, i.e., ensuring that data exchanged via data space connectors complies with the FAIR Principles, i.e., is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. As FAIR Digital Objects have globally unique identifiers, this approach holds further potential for the exchange of data across data spaces that the economy is striving for. Further innovation for cross-sector data exchange can be expected from the development of further demonstrators for FAIR Data Spaces project by the end of 2024, which has been put out to tender by Fraunhofer FIT.