IDSA is particularly excited to announce that IDS technology is enabling just that: Different data spaces can talk to each other – meaning data is not only shared within a data space but also between complete data spaces. This can even address climate change and reduce CO2 emissions.
Tracking carbon emissions
But how? Let’s take a closer look: Tracking carbon emissions is becoming increasingly important, and every company needs to figure out how to contribute to climate action. In many countries it is mandatory to communicate the CO2 emission of produced goods which means to track and gather the CO2 emission from various partners and machines.
Connected data spaces enable to securely share these emission data across companies, national borders and even continents. This is exactly what the renowned Dutch research institute TNO has realized together with the Japanese telecommunications company NTT and the German service provider sovity. They shared and collected data from two OMRON factories in Japan and the Netherlands via three data spaces: the Japanese data space (NTT and Omron), the Dutch data space (TNO, SCSN and Omron) and the German data space (sovity, IDSA testbed).
Through the alignment of different governance models, interoperability and compatibility between two connector technologies are now possible: The Data Space Connector provided by sovity and the TNO Security Gateway – both open-source IDS connector implementations. With this set-up, data from two continents can be continuously monitored in a sovereign way – meaning the data owner defines how this sensitive information can be used to keep business-critical information from being shared.
Demonstrator with visual dashboard
It was challenging to get the right and relevant data exchanged. Many questions were solved: What kind of data can or should be shared? What is needed? In the end not only is data shared but a visualization layer was added to show the CO2 emission in real time – visualized in a dashboard. The IDS RAM was the basis, the current result is a demonstrator. The demonstrator benefits from sovity’s strong experience with IDS concepts and TNO’s experience in applied research.
Now the work will be brought to the next level, the production level. This demonstrator is a blueprint that can be applied to any business and domain in the future. It can work on a large scale. This project is a huge step forward towards a data space landscape as it should look like. This development can address climate change problems and will help to achieve one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Trusted data spaces can bring us closer to a carbon-free world.
