Across the economy, companies are using digital technologies to pivot into innovative services, accelerate growth, and transform business processes. Data assets play an important role in this modern economy. To share this data, new technology is needed that supports openness, interoperability, extensibility, sovereignty and transparency. The International Data Spaces (IDS) Eclipse Dataspace Connector is that technology. The open-source project is supported by Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST, Daimler TSS, BMW Group, Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, SAP, ZF Friedrichshafen and GAIA-X AISBL as well as the International Data Spaces Association.
The Eclipse Dataspace Connector links enterprises from all domains to the International Data Spaces (IDS) ecosystem. A data space is a concept that defines the interaction of different technological components to promote cross-company data sharing while adhering to European data sovereignty principles. The participants may be data providers, data users and intermediaries. One of the most important technological components of such a data space is the connector, which links the individual participants and provides the endpoint for data sharing.“The Eclipse Dataspace Connector is important to the data economy because it represents unified, freely available access to emerging data spaces and the accompanying market environment for new data-driven business models.”
Markus Spiekermann, Head of Data Economy Department at Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST and Project Lead
“To compete in the data economy, it is necessary to develop an open source, extensible ecosystem for sovereign data sharing, which has the potential to be the place for more projects around IDS and GAIA-X in the future.”
Martin Haselbach, CEO & Managing director of Daimler TSS
“For the BMW Group a consistent data ecosystem is crucial to increase portability, interoperability as well as interconnectivity and data sovereignty for a wide variety of fields of application. The DataSpace Connector is an innovative, central component, which can enable the sovereign exchange of data according to defined guidelines and principals in line with Gaia-X.“
Marco Görgmaier, Head of DevOps Platform, Cloud Technologies at BMW Group
“Our customers want to share data across organizational and geographic boundaries in a way that protects their data assets while creating greater economic opportunity. The Eclipse Dataspace Connector is a foundational component that realizes this vision by enabling open, policy-based, multi-cloud data sharing.”
Ulrich Homann, Corporate Vice President and Distinguished Architect at Microsoft
IDS standard for data sovereignty
The Eclipse Dataspace Connector provides a connector framework for sovereign, inter-organizational data exchange. The framework contains modules for performing data query, data exchange, policy enforcement, monitoring, and auditing. The Eclipse Dataspace Connector is an extensible, portable, platform independent multi-cloud framework that supports the International Data Spaces standard (IDS) as well as relevant protocols associated with the GAIA-X project to create a system for data sharing where each organization can exert control over how its shared data is used.
All stakeholders across the industry, academia and government are encouraged to join and contribute to this open and IPR-free project. The project is governed by the Eclipse Foundation and the source depot of the Dataspace Connector can be found here.
Gaia-X hackathon in Munich
The Eclipse Dataspace Connector will be showcased at the Gaia-X Hackathon in Munich on August 30 and 31, 2021. All interested developers are invited to co-develop this open source, extensible ecosystem for sovereign B2B data sharing. Register for the Hackathon here.
