Data ecosystems and enablers

Data is an essential resource for economic and societal growth, innovation and job creation. The Data Ecosystems and Enablers (ENABLED) project contributes towards the establishment of data-sharing approaches that bring together a multitude of emerging technologies, infrastructures, sources, standards, and licenses in the EU alongside different data governance models.

ENABLED carries out a number of hands-on experiments and provides a multidisciplinary perspective on technical and organisational enablers on data sharing.

Different data sharing aspects are analysed to identify incentives and gaps that will aid in the establishment and sustainability of data ecosystems and common European data spaces.

Policy context: European Strategy for Data

ENABLED is helping to set up a single market for data in Europe defined under the European Strategy for Data. This strategy involves the collaboration of multiple actors (including public authorities, private enterprises, academia and citizens) on data-related matters.

For its successful implementation, many organisational, technical, legal and economic aspects are critically important to consider.

From a governance perspective, the incentives and interests of all stakeholders involved need to be considered to achieve inclusive data governance approaches that ensure that the different actors in the data value chain have a fairer share of the benefits brought by improved data sharing.

From a technical perspective, the investigation needs to include data-sharing approaches that bring together a multitude of emerging technologies, infrastructures, sources, standards, and licenses. The emerging concept of a 'digital twin' as a replica of the real world can interconnect all of those components.

Policy initiatives involved:

ENABLED objectives and scope

To study the actors, roles, barriers, and enablers in data ecosystems in order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different socio-economic, organisational and technical approaches.
To inform the implementation of the European Strategy for Data at multiple levels of governance, through the identification of enablers and bottlenecks in existing data sharing initiatives and experimental evaluation of prominent technological building blocks.
To support the scoping and implementation of the European Green Deal Data Space through dedicated activities informing the revision of the current legal framework defined by the GreenData4All initiative and the associated non-legal technical provisions.

ENABLED does this by focusing on:

The technical, semantic and organisational enablers for data ecosystems and European data spaces.
Interdisciplinary research on data-sharing infrastructures and building blocks such as Internet of Things, data interoperability, data-sharing tools, data-intensive infrastructures and architectures.
Inclusive citizen-centric data governance approaches and the sustainability and scalability of data-driven innovation.

Scientific evidence produced by the project will facilitate the establishment of data sharing practices in the EU through informing the scoping and implementation of legal instruments defined by the European Strategy for Data.