The Green Deal Data Space (GDDS) is one of the common European data spaces envisioned by the European Commission which will integrate enormous amounts of cross-sectorial data in support of the priority actions of the Green Deal in terms of biodiversity, zero pollution, circular economy, climate change, forestal services, smart mobility and environmental compliance.

AD4GD is one of the projects conducting research to elaborate a proposal of building blocks for the future creation of this dedicated data space with a focus on FAIR principles, international standards and interoperability concepts for heterogeneous data integration.

The European Green Deal stands as the European Commission’s ambitious roadmap to transform society and economy towards combating climate change and its derived challenges. Through this comprehensive strategy, the EU aspires to become the world’s first resource-efficient and competitive economy, achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 

The Green Deal targets a very diverse range of topics of great importance for the health of our planet including climate change, circular economy, pollution, biodiversity and deforestation. These priorities relate to established European directives such as the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and the recently approved Nature Restoration Law or the European Climate Law, as an integral part of the Commission’s strategy to implement the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  

Data, services and digital technologies play a pivotal role in realizing this green transformation. The Green Deal advocates for accessible and interoperable data to be at the heart of innovation and recognizes that edge computing, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and other digital assets are critical enablers of impactful climate policies. 

 A data space is a digital environment that enables the reliable exchange of data while retaining sovereignty, and ensuring trust and security under a set of mutually agreed rules. Data spaces benefit from consolidated data management strategy designed to ensure semantic interoperability and integration of data from different sources. In a Spatial Data Infrastructure trust was based on the reputation of a reduced group of data providers (mainly public administrations) while in the data space, trust is established between a digitally certified data provider and an authorized recipient under rules defined in digital contracts and data licenses. In Spatial Data infrastructures the focus was on data access for providers while in data spaces the focus is on a more symmetrical data exchange among all participants. Data spaces should allow exchange of both open data and private data respecting the privacy and sensitive data rules and regulations. 

Europe is to become a role model for a society where data empower both business and the public sector to make better decisions. The European Strategy for Data supports the creation of a single European Data Space, defined as a single market for data with secure and easy data sharing mechanisms that boosts growth and value within the EU laws and regulations. This market would be open for data from across the world, both open and private/protected data including  also sensitive business data, enabling industry exchange enormous amounts of high-quality data. 

The route towards materializing these aspirations involves the prior creation of up to 14 common European data spaces that are expected to bring together relevant data infrastructures and governance frameworks in strategic sectors. The aim is to overcome legal and technical barriers to data sharing by combining the necessary tools and services in an interoperable and reusable way.

The European Strategy for Data includes the development of 14 sectorial/domain data spaces. Infography adapted from https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/strategy-data. Author: AD4GD.

The benefits of these common European dataspaces range from more conscious energy consumption to smart mobility, more sustainable agriculture, quality healthcare and the development of high precision digital models of the Earth (Digital Twins) to monitor, better understand, anticipate and react to environmental and climate change challenges ahead of us, as well as eventual disasters and crises.

The AD4GD consortium is researching the concept of data space and proposing building blocks that respond to the needs of the Green Deal Data Space in collaboration with other projects and initiatives as the GREAT, FAIRiCUBE, B3 and USAGE Horizon projects. 

One of the pillars of AD4GD is to design these building blocks so that they comply with FAIR principles from the outset and operate according to international standards. Our mission is not only set on the FAIRness of the data itself, but also on the establishment of tools and services based on these principles, and demonstrate them in three pilot cases for water quality, biodiversity connectivity and air quality. 

Another key is to achieve the integration of data from diverse origins. We are talking about data coming mainly from satellite remote sensing, in-situ observation networks, sensors connected through the Internet of Things, citizen science, numerical models, and socio-economic data. To this end, our focus is on ensuring that different data providers use compatible concepts and measure variables that are consistent, what is technically described as semantic interoperability, by establishing services based on common vocabularies and metadata that guarantee unambiguous meanings.