The 4th Gaia-X Summit, organised by the European Gaia-X Initiative European Association for Data and Cloud (AISBL) in collaboration with the Gaia-X Hub Spain, took place in Alicante on 9 and 10 November. An ambitious European data strategy was defined in order to position Europe as a leading location for data and society in the global race for digitalisation. The important milestones and EU goals contained therein were presented by Gaia-X at the summit.
377 international members from industry and business elected Catherine Jestin (Airbus) as the new Chairwoman of Gaia-X ASIBL. In November, Ulrich Ahle was also appointed as the new Gaia-X AISBL CEO, who will now focus on implementing the data strategy during the market launch phase.
At the summit, Gaia-X presented concrete technology modules for the first time in the form of the new open source software Tagus-X, which will now be made available to the European IT market. Corresponding specifications and guidelines (frameworks) were also published for use in sovereign data management. Building on this, the Gaia-X community agreed on a clear release roadmap for the next development steps.
Another fundamental milestone is the harmonisation and the resulting common strategic orientation of current major European initiatives such as Gaia-X, International Data Space Association (IDSA), Big Data Value Association (BDVA) and Fiware, which are working together on several levels to jointly implement a basis for the European data economy through a common strategy.
The cooperation between the major European initiatives and the many country-specific hubs in the member states, such as the successful Gaia-X Hub Austria and the new Data Space Support Centre (DSSC) set up by the European Commission, has created a broad range of support services for European companies.
In order to ensure mutual trust, so-called Gaia-X Clearing Houses were set up, which serve to ensure trustworthy compliance with the jointly defined rules in a data space and are now available in an initial version as a service for European companies to implement the first economic use cases.
Finally, several concrete implementation examples of sovereign data spaces were impressively presented during the conference: Agdatahub (agriculture), EONA-X Dataspace (mobility, transport and tourism), EuProGigant (production), Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility (mobility), Mobility Data Space (mobility), Omega X (energy), Catena-X (automotive), Structura-X (cloud infrastructure), Prometheus-X (training and education).
The Gaia-X Hub Austria initiative was launched and is supported by the BMK and the State Secretariat for Digitalisation at the BMF.
Henriette Spyra, Head of the Innovation & Technology Section at the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation & Technology: "Data ecosystems play a crucial role for artificial intelligence because they enable access to diverse and high-quality data. The Gaia-X Hub Austria brings together Austrian and European activities to make data trustworthy and exchangeable. Making data accessible and usable for green and sustainable applications is of particular interest to the BMK.
Maria Ulmer Head of Section for Digitalisation and E-Government at the Federal Ministry of Finance: 'With the Gaia-X-Hub Austria, we have jointly set a strong signal for our business location. We accompany and support our companies in recognising the advantages of dataspaces and integrating them into their digitalisation strategies and projects. For the forward-looking development of our economy and for the benefit of our customers.
Helmut Leopold, Chairman Gaia-X Hub Austria: "Thanks to the joint efforts and close cooperation between research, business and industry as well as the public sector, we were able to initiate an Austrian ecosystem in a short space of time and successfully position ourselves in the EU.
Further information: 4. Gaia-X Summit, Alicante, 2023