Role of Gaia-X in the European Data Space Ecosystem
Authors: Tardieu Hubert 
Published: July 2022

The Gaia-X project was initiated in 2019 by the German and French Ministers of Economy to ensure that companies would not lose control of their industrial data when it is hosted by non-EU cloud service providers.

Since then, Gaia-X holds an international association presence in Belgium with more than 334 members, representing both users and providers across 20 countries and 16 national hubs and 5 candidate countries.

The Association aims to increase the adoption of cloud services and accelerate data exchanges by European businesses through the facilitation of business data sovereignty with jointly approved (user and provider) policy rules on data portability and interoperability.

Although for many enterprises, data sovereignty is seen as a prerequisite for using the cloud, a significant driver to boost the digital economy in business is incentivizing business data sharing. Two decades of cost optimization have constrained business value creation, driving many companies to neglect the opportunity to create shared value within a wider industry ecosystem.

Now, thanks to the participation of large numbers of cloud users in the domains of Finance, Health, Energy, Automotive, Travel Aeronautics, Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Mobility, among others, Gaia-X is ideally positioned to help industries define appropriate data spaces and identify/develop compelling use cases, which can then be jointly deployed to a compliant-by-design platform architecture under the Gaia-X specifications, trust, and labeling frameworks.

The creation of national Gaia-X hubs that act as independent think tanks, ambassadors, or influencers of the Association further facilitates the emergence of new data spaces and use/enabler cases at a country level, before these are subsequently extended to a European scope and beyond. Gaia-X partners share the view that data spaces will play a similar role in digital business as the web played 40 years ago to help the Internet take off.

The Gaia-X Working Groups are at the core of the Gaia-X discussions and deliverables. There are three committees: the Technical, the Policies and Rules, and the Data Spaces and Business.

The Technical Committee focus on key architectural elements and their evolution, such as and not limited to:

Identity and Access Management: bridge the traditional X509 realm and new SSI realm, creating a decentralized network of identity federations

Service Composition: how to assemble services in order to create new services with higher added value

Self-Description: how to build digital trust at scale with measurable and comparable criteria

The Policy and Rules Committee creates the deliverables required to develop the Gaia-X framework (compliance requirements, labels and qualification processes, credentials matrix, contractual agreements, etc.):

The Labels and Qualification working group defines the E2E process for labels and qualification, from defining and evolving the levels of label, the process for defining new labels, and identifying and certifying existing CABS.

The Credentials and Trust Anchors working group will develop and maintain a matrix of credentials and their verification methods to enable the implementation of compliance through automation, contractual clauses, certifications, or other methods.

The Compliance working group collects compliance requirements from all sources to build a unique compliance requirements pool.

The Data Spaces Business Committee helps the Association expanding and accelerating the creation of new Gaia-X service in the market:

The Finance working group focuses on business modeling and supports the project office of the Association.

The Technical working group analyzes the technical requirements from a business perspective.

The Operational Requirements working group is the business requirements unit.

The Hub working groups hold close contact with all Gaia-X Hubs and support the collection and creation of the Gaia-X use and business cases. These working groups maintain the international list of all use cases and data spaces and coordinate the Hubs.